After a somewhat rocky start at the MotoGP test in Valencia at the end of last season, Jonas Folger completed his second mission as a Yamaha test rider last week at Sepang.
The 25-year-old German was waiting for this meeting in Malaysia for the shakedown and then the first official test of the new year to really start working in his new role. Although, in his opinion, he only had a limited amount of time to drive, he drove a total of three days on the Malaysian circuit and the final day of shakedown testing served as a sort of warm-up before that he took to the track with all the MotoGP elite last Wednesday and Friday.
It is extremely rare for a test pilot to release a press release, so the least we can do is take advantage of this new upturn in form from the German pilot to read it…
Jonas Folger (Yamaha Factory Racing Europe Test Team, Yamaha Yamaha YZR-M1), 2'01.243: “The Sepang test overall summer very positive, especially from my point of view. Due to the heat it was of course very exhausting. Temperatures in February are even higher than during the Grand Prix race weekend in October. It was very hot on the bike, but I quickly got used to it. In this regard, I had absolutely no problems, my physical condition is good. The preparation in winter therefore paid off. The next step was to slip more and more into the role of test pilot. This change is not always easy for a rider, especially when the entire MotoGP grid is on the track at the same time. But I quickly detached myself from the times and focused exclusively on my work.
The structure of the test team was not much different from our first test last November in Valencia. This time, however, there were even more factory engineers and technicians on site than before. This staff effort was impressive to me. However, I still didn't have my team around me, as it must be the case in Europe. In Sepang, it was a mix of Japanese and Italian mechanics who were already in Valencia. The test was also planned in such a way that three riders had to share two motorcycles. That's why I was practically free on the second day. But that day I was often in the factory team's pits. Watching and listening, I got a lot of feedback from Valentino (Rossi) and Maverick (Viñales). So it was a very educational day for me. My work on the bike mainly consisted of numerous functional tests. There were a lot of things to sort out, what works and what doesn't. So nothing really great, but it was still an interesting test for me.”
