Monster Yamaha's Bradley Smith has finally nailed down a good base setting for his satellite YZR-M1 and can now spend time refining it for each track instead of hunting for a setup every weekend.

The British rider finished sixth in today's Sachsenring MotoGP round but, more importantly to him, cut the gap to the leader down by seven seconds to finish 25 seconds behind and he says it matters not the German circuit is short.

"Race distance is race distance, 25 seconds is still 25 seconds. We still see Rossi ten seconds back, which is a normal situation, Bautista 20-odd seconds back so for me that correlates. Although it is still a tight and twisty track, that performance is a good performance," said Smith, speaking at the Sachsenring.

"Today was a really good day. Yesterday I felt loads better but it didn't really look like it on the laptimes. Today that showed by improving another seven seconds by taking that gap down. Unlocking the way to push for that one fast lap in qualifying, riding one of these with low fuel, brand new Bridgestones is worse than a 125, it's more scary. I still need to learn to to extract more from it.

"One of the great things this weekend was we stayed with a similar setting. We didn't have to chop, change and move around. We have actually found a good base setting and now it's just a case of refining it. We still learned a lot from this weekend, especially in the race and what we want to try for the future but is was a great job."