Lorenzo: Lap times will rise early in the race

Jorge Lorenzo is predicting a significant drop in tyre performance after the opening laps of today’s British MotoGP.

The reigning triple champion was fourth quickest, 0.6s from Ducati’s Andrea Iannone, during Friday practice at Silverstone. Lorenzo’s priority is now to find an ‘easy’ setting for his M1 to help reduce the lap time swing over race distance.

“It’s difficult to keep a constant pace. With new tyres, you go much faster than when you have some laps on the rear tyre,” Lorenzo said. “So it’s going to be important to have an easy setting that give you the feeling to keep as constant pace as possible for all the race.

“Iannone with a new tyre has been very fast. But with old tyres or not so new tyres, the pace of five or ten top riders was very similar. We still did not do a lot of laps in a row, and this will be very important for Sunday. The race will be not very long on the number of laps, but obviously very long on distance and total time.

“I don’t think that we will have the same pace as in Brno and Austria. The first laps will be high 2’01 or low 2’02, but then we will be in 2’03 very soon. So the one who has the best setting to keep a constant pace will have a good benefit, and for the moment, we have a long way to work on that.”

But such low two-minute lap times depend on the weather staying dry and, while MotoGP avoided the rain on Friday, both Moto2 sessions were disrupted.

After struggling in the wet this season, how would Lorenzo feel about more rain this weekend?

“As I always say, I can’t control the weather. I would like to control the weather, because I would choose always dry conditions. But because I cannot, I have to put my helmet on and get the best performance out of myself.

“The performance this year on the wet until now was very bad. I know that, even if in Brno I was faster. So I don’t have any choice except to go out there and try to improve the bike, myself, and try to go faster.”

Lorenzo does not have latest Yamaha chassis made available for team-mate Valentino Rossi since the Brno test, but did to try a new swingarm at Silverstone on Friday. “We are trying something to especially improve the turning of the bike and we are improving it,” he said.

Lorenzo - a Silverstone winner in 2010, 2012 and 2013 - starts this weekend 59-points from Marquez and six from Rossi.