Rins

Alex Rins thinks he “needs to do something different” to speed up his adaption to Yamaha’s MotoGP bike, since duplicating Fabio Quartararo’s set-up hasn’t delivered the required results thus far.

Rins finished 13th in Sunday’s Portuguese Grand Prix, six places behind team-mate Quartararo, in what was his second competitive weekend for Yamaha after his off-season swap from LCR Honda.

Although this was a significant improvement from his point-less 16th-place performance in the season-opening Qatar Grand Prix, when the Yamaha package was rather uncompetitive, the Spaniard believed he experienced the same challenges in Portimao that plagued him at Losail.

Having relied on Quartararo’s set-up as a base line thus far, the 28-year-old thinks he now has to pursue a new way in order to acquire a better grip on the 2024-spec M1.

“It was a hard race,” he stated after gaining his maiden points with Yamaha. “These two races I did, Qatar and Portimao, were not the way that I was expecting.

“We need to work a little bit more on our own. We make little tweaks on the bike but concentrated on the set-up that Fabio is using, more or less.

“After this race I realised that I need to do something different on the bike because I have similar problems as the race in Qatar.

“I was struggling a lot with the front, after releasing brakes, going on throttle. I am straining to turn, I cannot do [lean] angle.”

He added: “It's more set-up than my position on the bike. In the midst of the race I attempted to adjust my riding technique on the bike to see if I was able to lock more the front, but it was not enough.

“So looks like we need more weight on the front to make the bike turn.”

Yamaha held a private test in Portimao on Monday, taking use of the new concessions system implemented in 2024 to bridge the gap between Japanese and European marques in the championship.

However, owing to unclean track conditions, not much productive running was able to take place.