Monster Yamaha Tech3’s Johann Zarco continued to impress on Monday at the Sepang International Circuit, the second day of pre-season testing in 2018. The French rider improved by more than 0.7 seconds in order to hit his target, well arriving inside the 59’s.

However, Yonny Hernandez did well to further adapt his riding style to the Yamaha YZR-M1 and gradually finds his way back to the highly-competitive MotoGP field. The 29-year-old lowered his lap time from day one by about half a second.


Johann Zarco - Position: 6th - Time: 1’59.702 - Laps: 48

“What we saw from the first day, the bike is able to be very consistent, but yesterday I felt it was not fast enough. On my last lap today though, I have been very quick and was able to clock a really good time. Obviously, the other riders increased their pace in the last 30 minutes. Anyway, we can be happy, as we reached our goal to be under the 2 minutes bracket. There are many positives to take away from today, although it has not been easy to find solutions in some areas we wanted to improve. It’s the first winter test of this year, therefore it’s truly important to work on the bike rather than just try to set a fast lap time. For now, I have to rest a bit and sleep well and tomorrow we want to try some different things to be able to give even more feedback.”


Yonny Hernandez - Position: 25th - Time: 2’01.554 - Laps: 49

“On day two we found a small improvement and I’m happy about that. Compared to yesterday, we also lowered our lap time by half a second, which is another positive point. Clearly, this is not the position we want to be in, but today we understood more and more aspects about the bike. I just focused on riding the Yamaha, plus I also did some good work with used tyres, which is very important. I learned to ride the bike on it, used the traction control a lot and trying to figure out how the medium and the soft tyres perform. I’m pleased that we are improving day by day, exit by exit, just doing as many kilometers as possible. The goal for tomorrow is the same like today; learning a lot and trying to reduce the gap to the top.”