Jorge Lorenzo declared himself excited about Yamaha's prospects for the 2012 season after the second test of the team's 1000cc bike at Misano today.
Both Lorenzo and teammate Ben Spies were in action on the 2012-rules bike, completing 60 and 74 laps, respectively. Lorenzo's best lap was a 1m33.7s – 0.2sec inside the lap record he set when winning the San Marino Grand Prix at the track last weekend. Spies was 0.6sec slower.
The MotoGP champion said it was already becoming clear that next year's bikes would require a very different style to the current 800cc machines.
"It's been a little bit more difficult here than Brno, which is a very fast track," said Lorenzo. "Misano is a little bit slower so the difference between the 800 and the 1000 is much smaller. It's difficult to understand the riding style you must use straight away.
"We've made a lot of progress in a couple of hours and the bike has a lot of potential. I'm very excited about the future.
"We've been working on the electronics to help in the braking area but mainly I've been getting used to the riding style of the bike and also adapting the bike to my riding."
Spies agreed that the bike's characteristics were very different to the 2011 package, but felt this was positive.
"We rode the same bike as we did in Brno but we changed a bunch of things and started working on a lot of electronics," he explained. "Misano is a much more physical track; it's quite tight so there's a lot of wheelies and rear spinning.
"It's fun to ride but very physical compared to the 800. I enjoyed it a lot and we went quite fast on it, getting some pretty good lap times.
"We've got a lot of data now for the engineers to go away and work on the next step for our next test. I think next year is going to be really good and I'm looking forward to racing the thousand."