Maverick Vinales' 'feet on ground' over Suzuki's MotoGP test pace
Maverick Vinales says he must 'keep his feet on the ground' about Suzuki's MotoGP prospects in 2016, despite setting the fastest time of the Phillip Island test
The Spaniard topped Thursday's second day of running and his 1m29.131s was not beaten on Friday, when Vinales was second to Marc Marquez.
During his rookie season and Suzuki's first back in MotoGP, Vinales qualified on the front row at Barcelona, and recorded a pair of sixth-place finishes.
Vinales crashed on cold tyres at Turn 6 on Friday morning and while he believes he could have gone even faster, he is not getting carried away with the timesheets.
"Of course ending a test at the top is a good feeling that makes you comfortable for the future, but we must keep our feet on the ground and stay focused on the development plan we have set," he said.
"I couldn't improve my laptime [from Thursday], but we are aware of the reason why this happened.
"We focused on testing different configurations of the new chassis and this took us some time.
"Maybe if I continued with the previous one I could have done a better time but it is important for us to us to work with a long-term vision and exploit the tests for what they are."
Suzuki now has a seamless gearbox, with Vinales and team-mate Aleix Espargaro testing an 'upshift-only' version while test rider Takuya Tsuda develops the fully seamless version.
The manufacturer says it is yet to decide whether the race riders will use the next-specification transmission in its GSX-RR during the Qatar test or the season opener.
"The development of the machine for the season is still a long way off and we still have much potential that we need to investigate," Vinales added.
"For sure I'm happy in how this test went overall, we made solid progress both in the single-lap performance and for the consistency, even though the variable weather didn't allow us to really test a race simulation.
"For Qatar it will be important to further investigate the electronics; it is still a field where we miss experience as it's completely new.
"But we have already done much work for this and collected a good amount of data, which will be useful for us."
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