Monster Energy Yamaha’s Franky Morbidelli recovered from a disappointing race day to eighth in the MotoGP Catalan test on Monday.

It was a position he feels he could have been able to challenge for in Sunday’s race were it not for the opening lap chaos and being tagged to the back of the pack. While his comeback bore fruit, in the form of three championship points, it’s not where he or the factory Yamaha team expect to be.

“This weekend we saw some good things especially Friday,” Morbidelli said of the Barcelona GP. “With no grip the feeling was really good then the grip increased and I started to struggle again but generally less.

“In the beginning I have a little bit of an incident with another rider and I was very behind from the pack. I was dead last but I was able to catch back, catch back and finally get close to the battle for top ten so this is definitely a step ahead.

“This is positive but we are not where we want to be. We know where we need to improve, we are chasing, we are trying to find the right feeling and we will manage at some point.”

With the work in mind, Monday saw the Italian set about 78 laps of analysis with a raft of items at his disposal. His fastest effort falling just 0.348s short of his teammate Fabio Quartararo at the top of the times.

“Busy day. We made many laps,” Morbidelli confirmed from Spain on Monday evening. “We tried many things to improve the feeling and we made some progress I’d say. Not only with new tyres, but the pace was better so I’m pretty happy with it, with the work we’ve done.

“There’s still some room to improve. We need to improve in some areas still, but I think we made a good progress. I didn’t have the chance to try [the swingarm]. I tried it already so I know what it gives and what it takes but I didn’t have the time to try it today. I feel that there is more potential, even though the overall potential during the weekend was not so bad.

“If I didn’t have the incident I think I could have fought for top ten for sure but we don’t want to just fight for top ten we want more so we are working to get where we want to be.”

While Quartararo has opted not to utilise the new fairing for the remainder of the season, Morbidelli is happy to have the option available when he feels it’s needed.

“We’re going to use the downforce one for Sachsenring for sure because it’s a track where you need some more downforce to avoid to wheelie. So we’re going to use that one but for other tracks, we are going to use the other one for sure.”