Suzuki MotoGP new boy Alex Rins is aiming to equal or beat the performance benchmarks set by his predecessor Maverick Vinales but realised there will be a lot of pressure as he steps into his fellow Spaniard’s shoes.

Vinales took a blue riband class win on the GSX-RR last year and was regularly pestering the podium. It won’t be the first time Rins has followed Vinales, as he joined the Pons Moto2 team directly after Vinales left, but suffered a big crash in testing at Valencia which saw him sidelined for a month.

“Obviously it’s going to be a lot of pressure, because I’m replacing Maverick at Suzuki. And I have always been racing him and battling with him in the smaller categories. And in Moto2, he left Paginas Amarillas HP40 and I joined them, so there’s always been a bit of comparison. But hopefully that will continue in MotoGP due to me having had two incredible seasons. I’ll try to equal what he did – or even beat it,” said Rins.

“I had a whole month in the corset and trying to rest, because back injuries are something to take seriously. The crash was a strange one because I fell, and then a couple of laps later my teammate, Andrea Iannone, fell in exactly the same place. We went through the telemetry trying to determine the cause but we didn’t find anything. I took the same trajectory, the front wheel locked, and I lost it.”