Barcelona (Spain), 13 June 2015 – Alvaro Bautista finished the sessions that will determine the starting grid order riding his Aprilia RS-GP to the 10th best time in QP1 (in 1’42,600) which earns him the 20th overall place and therefore the seventh row on the starting grid tomorrow at the Montmelò circuit. Marco Melandri will start from the 24th spot that he earned with the 14th best time (1’44,345) he put on the sheets during the qualifying session.
After the midweek tests conducted at Misano and in the spirit of the 2015 season-long test, Aprilia Racing Team Gresini brought various set up and chassis changes to Barcelona which led to some improvements, especially for Bautista who put in a nice time in the penultimate free practice session (FP3) before the qualifiers.
Now, in view of tomorrow’s race, the Sunday morning warm up session will be used to continue looking for better solutions, especially to increase grip on a worn tyre.
ROMANO ALBESIANO (Aprilia Racing Manager)
“With a new tyre we are performing fairly well. The problem we need to solve is that this performance drops as the tyre wears. Naturally we’ll be taking advantage of the warm up session tomorrow down to the last minute looking for more traction with a worn tyre. We can’t be afraid of revolutionising the entire package for the sake of testing every possible solution.”
FAUSTO GRESINI (Team Manager)
“As usual, today Alvaro really gave it his all, but I don’t think it will be an easy race tomorrow. After a few laps the bike starts to slide and we lose traction. So tomorrow we’ll try some more solutions to improve the situation.”
ALVARO BAUTISTA
“Today we improved our pace a bit compared to yesterday but I’m still lacking grip at the rear. In FP4 I went out on used tyres specifically to try and see how the bike would perform in this situation. With the new tyre in the qualifiers I lapped faster but the race will be more difficult because this track really eats up the tyres and this is a situation that my bike does not like much.”
MARCO MELANDRI
“To be honest I expected to take a bigger step forward. We worked well but we still haven’t solved the usual chassis problem. Tomorrow we’ll try a different setting to aim for a decent race.”
