Petronas Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi left the Catalan MotoGP test in a more positive frame of mind and hopes to continue the pace he found into this weekend’s Sachsenring race.

The nine-time world champion finished the test six-tenths behind former team-mate and timesheet topper Maverick Vinales with little in the way of new stuff to try.

“We didn’t have a lot of parts to test, we did have a few things and settings that we wanted to try. First of all we tried to understand why we were slower than the pace we had in practice,” said The Doctor.

“I was more in line with FP4 and Warm Up. After that we worked on the bike, the suspension and tried some different things. At the end of the day the feeling was positive, I was in the top-ten, my pace was good and my lap time was not so far from the top.

“We tried the new brake discs, because in Austria the brakes are under a lot of stress, and the feeling with them was good. Ee tried some settings that we wanted to look at and my pace was good. I was in the top ten and the feeling was positive.

“I hope we can continue this in Germany and have a good weekend, where our race goes like we expect. It’s a very different track to the others, with a lot of the corners on the left and this makes it quite a tricky circuit, it can be very difficult sometimes – but I have had some great battles in the past there, especially in 2009.”