Suzuki MotoGP test rider Randy De Puniet lopped half a second off his best time on the second day of MotoGP testing at Austin with a 2’05.85 which would have put him next to Hiro Aoyama on the grid in last Sunday’s race.

De Puniet completed 62 laps of the Texas track, focusing on engine and chassis specs while also working on electronic settings in readiness for his wildcard appearance at Valencia. He will also test at Argentina.

“I’m happy that we have found a big improvement on throttle connection and traction control. We worked some time to find the right setting with the new electronics also and at the end we found a good compromise,” said the Frenchman.

“ We continued to work on the chosen chassis and it worked really well today. So the package is definitely better and I wanted to have an extra day to be able to continue the work as yesterday we spent most of the time setting-up the bike for the new circuit along with the new electronics. Also, I have not been riding a bike for a few weeks and I needed to get back the feeling.

“Anyway, today on the race tyre, we improved a lot from yesterday’s lap times and found a good pace. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to try some sort-of time-attack by the end of the day as we had a small problem on the bike and we lost the last half-hour on the track. But I feel we had the potential to even further improve our performance.

“Now we’ll go to Argentina - which is a completely new circuit - but I’m glad we will go there soon and hopefully I will be still hot from this test.”