Even though Maverick Vinales topped the second day's timesheets at Valencia yesterday, he says the 2020 MotoGP YZR-M1 is still too far behind his rivals in terms of top speed.

The Monster Yamaha man was the only rider to dip into the 1'29s at the Spanish track despite still lacking five miles per hour along Valencia's relatively short-straight. But there was an upside as the engine was still pulling when in slipstream.

"For sure we need a little bit more power, a little bit more arrived but it’s not enough, our competitors are still far away so we need to keep working on that area and try not to lose on the others," said Vinales, speaking at the track.

"Still 8km/h difference, I take many slipstreams trying to understand if it was better or not. In the slipstream I feel much better because the engine keeps going, not like last year, so for that I’m quite happy.

But still there remains lap-by-lap a 5-6km/h difference, so we need to try to recover that. But the plan for this test was to try to recover the maximum information about the engine so that Yamaha can make another step."

Vinales believes the Yamaha package with which he ended this season was very good and might be difficult to top but more speed and better tyre life through an adjusted character will go towards that.

"On the bottom it’s very similar, which is very positive, because this year was really good, we had a lot of traction. So it seems very positive, but still we need a little bit more on the top.

"Honestly the package we had at the end of the season was one of the best I had in Yamaha, so it will be difficult to be better but we are trying everything."