'Dirty work' for Rossi, 'potential' tomorrow

Valentino Rossi may have dropped from third to eighth on the second night of the Qatar MotoGP test, but the Italian star insists that didn't represent the work done during his penultimate pre-season outing.

Rossi and Movistar Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo (third) were the only riders in the top ten not to improve on their Wednesday lap time, but The Doctor is planning a big push to discover his potential on the final night.

"I work a lot and did a lot of laps and at the end my performance was not fantastic, because in the lap time and position I'm a little worse than yesterday. But in reality we never made a real time attack because we tried to save some tyres for tomorrow," Rossi explained.

"We arrived at the point where if we tried [new tyres] today we would not have tyres for tomorrow. So today we did some 'dirty work'. We tried a lot of things and I think we did a good job.

"We still have some doubt about the base setting, but is something quite small to still decide. So we had some stuff to try, different in the electronic, the response of the engine, but also the suspension front and rear.

"So we decided to concentrate there and keep some energy for tomorrow. We will put everything together tomorrow, use the tyre that is a little bit softer to understand our potential for the time attack and do 10-15 laps in a row to understand our race pace."

Rossi, who was 0.458s behind Suzuki pace setter Maverick Vinales, added: "A '55.4 by Vinales is a good lap time. We need to understand tomorrow. It looks like there are five or six riders who are very fast and I think we are there."