Movistar Yamaha MotoGP’s Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi were on track today for the first practice session of the last race of the season, the Gran Premio de la Comunitat Valenciana.

Lorenzo made a strong start this morning at the Comunitat Valenciana Ricardo Tormo Circuit. The Majorcan set multiple fastest laps and led for most of the session, before settling for second place just 0.193 from the front.

The afternoon saw more of the same from him, riding smoothly at the start of the session while testing the asymmetric front tyre. He was unable to improve on his 1'31.489 lap from the morning and completed the day as second in the combined times.

It was a busy day for teammate Valentino Rossi. While trying to find the perfect set up, the nine-time world champion set a time of 1'31.767 in the morning to finished in fifth position, just 0.471 seconds behind the leader.

He wasted no time in the afternoon and was the first out on track and briefly led the way, before starting a consistently fast race simulation. Throughout the session he worked through a couple of set up changes, but didn’t improve his time and finished in seventh place for the day.

Jorge Lorenzo - 2nd / 1'31.489 / 20 laps

“Today, having a very good pace came easy from the beginning. This is the first time this season that I got to ride such a good pace this easily, so I’m very happy about the performance of the bike. Now we have to try some things and try to improve, but the pace of the bike is very good and I’m really satisfied. I was satisfied about the asymmetrical tyre. The "32" side doesn’t give exactly the same level of grip as the side of the "31"; it’s a little bit less but there isn’t a big difference. Tomorrow I’ll probably try the "32" but the question is about the rear. I think the soft tyre could be too soft for the race. You could probably manage to finish the race, but the soft tyre will start to drop a little. The hard tyre is too hard, but tomorrow we’re going to try it and see which option is better.”

Valentino Rossi - 7th / 1'31.767 / 21 laps

“I think that the front tyre choice will be very important. We have three options and here we have the asymmetric tyre for the second time, which is not so bad. I tried it and also tried the medium, but we still have to decide which one we’ll use because we’re not all good with the setting. We had some problems that at the end of this morning weren’t so bad, but this afternoon I struggled a lot more to ride the bike and I didn’t feel good. In fact, my rhythm is not fantastic, so we have to try to make things better tomorrow. We’re a little bit worried, because usually we go with the harder tyre, but on the hard tyre we lose a lot of time, but the soft tyre looks to be a little bit too soft. This is the situation at the moment, but we hope that the track will improve so we can use the softer option.”

Massimo Meregalli - Movistar Yamaha MotoGP Team Director

“It’s a good starting day. Jorge had a better day than Vale, but it’s the first day and there’s still a lot of time to fix things and to decide on the tyres. Jorge had really good speed and pace. We tested a few things with Vale today, but unfortunately he couldn’t improve his time and we need to find what’s missing. There is still some work to do to get him more to the front, where he belongs, but we are confident that we can do it. We know that this weekend is going to be hot and we’ll put in all our focus as usual to be ready on Sunday afternoon.”

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