Suzuki Ecstar’s Joan Mir began his San Marino GP campaign from second in the standings after an impressive start to Friday’s morning practice.
Setting his fastest lap, a 1’32.746 just before the rain arrived, the reigning champion was just eight-hundredths shy of the overall best and confident there is more to come, no matter the weather conditions this weekend.
“It was a shame that I wasn’t able to do a time attack with a soft tyre today, because that’s something we want to work on, and we need to work on,” Mir admitted from Misano after FP2. “But the weather had other ideas!
“At the moment I feel competitive. It’s really important, especially in dry to feel great on the first moment because normally we see that on Friday I struggle a bit more, then we work, and then I’m getting better and better. So, if we are able to start with a good potential like today, tomorrow, means that we can also have more potential on quali.
“I’m happy about the work of the team today,” he continued. “We collected a lot of good information, and although there’s still margin to improve, we’ve done a good job and we feel happy and strong here. The track is unpredictable in the wet so I was very cautious, but I felt quite strong. We improved the bike exit by exit and finally I was quite competitive. Let’s see tomorrow if we get some dry track time.
“We have to work in both conditions,” he elaborated. “Especially in the dry - I think there we have margin. In wet always is all about feeling, and I think that we are not so bad in talking about feeling, we can be much competitive but at the moment the feeling is correct, it’s positive. So let’s try to work a bit tonight and to try to understand in what phases we can improve and see what we can do tomorrow.”
Suzuki were seen working both with and without the ride height device throughout Friday’s sessions, after running without at Aragón last weekend.
“We work on that,” Mr confirmed. “This is one of the things that we have to see tonight. Which one is better, looks with the device is better in some phases and without in a different ones. So let’s see what we can do.”
