Rossi switches focus to engine braking and rear-tyre life

Both Lorenzo and Marquez have carved chunks out of Rossi’s points lead, and he is now level at the top of the standings with Lorenzo on 211.

With Lorenzo setting the pace at Silverstone today, with Marquez just 0.033s behind, Rossi was almost a second off their pace.

He explained that this was mainly due to testing out new settings aimed at improving his chances in Sunday’s race, as he thinks Saturday’s qualifying day could be disrupted by rain.

“We work a lot with the engine braking, because we want to improve in some area, but we don’t find the right way to go faster in the corner,” explained Rossi.

“Also the soft tyre, that’s supposed to be the race tyre, is good at the beginning but after some laps it offers too much [wheel]spin – so this is the main problem and we try to improve for the race.

“We suffered a lot with the degradation of the rear tyre, so we tried to work on this in the afternoon, changing the settings, but unfortunate we don’t find anything very good.”

Rossi hopes that he can close the gap tomorrow, as he didn’t go for a qualifying-style run at any point on Friday.

“I didn’t concentrate on the laptime attack, and some of the guys were on the softer tyre, so my position was bad but not a disaster,” he added.

“The performance is not fantastic but we work a lot, we tried a lot of different things, and we hope we understand more or less the way to go and we try tomorrow to be strong.”