A cold and wet Le Mans track greeted Sam Lowes for the first day of Moto2 practice ahead of the French MotoGP round but despite the treacherous conditions the British rider soon got down to business.

Making solid progress in the early stages to maintain a top ten position while assessing Dunlop’s wet weather tyres, a crash at turn nine prevented further progress, his personal best time of 1’52.942 sitting him 19th in the morning session.

The afternoon proved more promising as a drying track allowed Lowes to complete a full session on slick tyres, consistently improving his lap times before a 1’38.562, set with less than 10 minutes remaining, put the number 22 in charge.

As the pace continued to quicken the Marc VDS rider found an additional 0.4 seconds in the closing stages of FP2 before yellow flags halted his advance, capping his session in fourth and narrowly ahead of teammate Augusto Fernandez.

“It was definitely a challenging day in those conditions, but we got to work through a lot of stuff, particularly this morning in the rain which can certainly help us in the future," said Lowes.

“I’m happy with my pace this afternoon in the dry as well because I just kept the same set of tyres in for the whole session and I could have been even faster at the end, but the yellow flags prevented me from doing so.

“Hopefully it will be dry tomorrow because I’d certainly like to work on improving stopping the bike. I feel good on corner exit, but we need to improve my feeling on entry.

“This is a different track compared to what we’ve been on lately, but I’ve come here and been fast and that’s the most important thing.”