Britain’s Bradley Smith confirmed he was testing a new chassis for Aprilia at Misano but was unable to do much work with the holeshot system as it they experienced problems with it.
The Oxfordshire rider was in the mix when it came to laptimes, posting a 1’32.590 on his last lap to claim 12th on the overall timesheet and one place ahead of team-mate Aleix Espargaro.
“It was a big day. Didn’t quite get the 100 laps but did 96, first man out on track and one of the last to leave. We need to do it at the moment, the performance of the bike is still not exactly where we want it,” said Smith, speaking at the track.
“In the GP, I felt like I went back to being a test rider so the main thing with this was to get everything out of the way and get ready for this weekend.
I was happy to dip into the 1’32s at the end and I did try a new chassis and the main objective of that was to get more turn-in on the bike. Engine-wise we are a little bit stronger than the Suzuki and Yamaha but still slower than KTM, Honda and Ducati.We need to work on corner speed rather than engine grunt at the moment.
“Hopefully the engine will be stronger next year so right now we need to work on something that turns a little bit nicer. We found a couple of steps, so that’s good.
“We played around with the ride height system but we had a couple of problems with that today so I was a little disappointed I was unable to try that as this is a circuit where it would help out.”
Develoment of the system will now switch to test rider Lorenzo Savadori as Aprilia have a private test planned after MotoGP Barcelona round and it could be available to Smith and Espargaro at Le Mans.
