Bridgestone have responsed to a duff tyre broadside delivered by both Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo after today’s Motorland Aragon MotoGP sessions (click here), saying the laptimes tell a different story.

The firm’s MotoGP representative Carmine Moscaritolo responded to communication from bikesportnews.com this evening, saying that if either rider had experienced a bad tyre, then a drop in performance would have been substantially more marked.

"As always we analyse the tyres after each session and following the comments from Jorge and Vale, did an initial examination of the tyres in question. The tyre analysis hasn't revealed any abnormalities, but we'll send them back to our technical centre in Japan to make sure,” he said.

“Looking at the lap time data however, a defective tyre/s seems to be highly unlikely. Of Jorge's two tyres he questioned today, one was a used tyre carried over from yesterday that he hasn't previously complained about, so if it was defective the issue would have been immediately apparent.

“With the second tyre, this was a new tyre he used in his last run in QP2 when he actually set his quickest time of the weekend. This seems to suggest the tyre was working as intended, a defective tyre would result in a marked decrease in performance, not an increase.

“In Valentino's case, although he mentioned a difference in grip level, the performance wasn't that different to what was achieved on other tyres, which once again indicates that the tyre wasn't defective. If a tyre was defective you would expect performance to suffer considerably.

“Bridgestone prides itself on its quality control and believes its MotoGP tyres set the standard in the motorsport world in terms of quality control and consistency.”