Monster Energy Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo was looking far from confident as preparations for the San Marino GP got underway at Misano on Friday.

Completing the morning seventh in the standings, he sat 18th by the end of the afternoon’s wet session and was visibly struggling with the conditions on his YZR-M1. The Frenchman, however, is clear where he needs to work and hopeful of a solution come Saturday.

“When you look at my position, it looks like I didn’t make any progress in the wet, but considering my feelings on the bike I did make a small step,” Quartararo explained on Friday evening.

“I improved my lap time at the end of FP2, but I didn’t do any of my fastest sectors on my fastest lap, so there’s a margin for improvement. I think we will make another step working in this direction which will make the setting a bit better.

“This morning in the dry, the feeling wasn’t good with the soft front, which is not my preferred tyre anyway, and we still were not so far from first. That’s actually positive - we already know what we want to try to improve. We tried it straight away on run 2 of FP1. It won’t take us long because we know what steps to take. It’s important to keep going in this direction so we can fix what’s going wrong.

“We tried a totally different setting this afternoon,” he continued. “Was a little bit better, and I think that the way we improve a little bit, was better but still I’m not feeling comfortable on the bike. I feel we make a small step in front but I have zero feeling on the fast corners so it’s tough. Let’s see what we can do but at the moment we have problem quite a lot.

“We’re still two-seconds from the top man but for me, our position is not real, now. For me, our position right now was in the top 12 I will say, but still in 2019 I’ve made all my practice on the wet in the top 10 and is something I can’t understand why I can’t have this feeling back.

When asked if he was struggling with both fast and slow corners he was quick to respond “Both!” Before continuing “but fast corners you feel much more and that’s the main problem. In the wet everything is so sensitive and in the fast corners, I can tell you the rear, having no rear stability in the fast corner is not so much confidence.

“FP1 with the soft front tyre was quite difficult but you need to start the weekend with the soft front tyre and is the tyre I don’t really like, because it’s too soft. Our plan, was to go with the medium front this afternoon, but with the rain was not possible and also like turn 11 this morning, I had some struggles with the soft front and with the bumps to go really fast.”