Team SUZUKI ECSTAR’s Aleix Espargaró and Maverick Viñales improved their lap-times in Friday’s opening practice sessions at the HJC Helmets Grand Prix Ceské republiky; both riding with completely different strategies.

In the cooler morning session, Viñales secured the seventh-best lap-time with a 1'57.176 around the 5.4 km Brno circuit in the Czech Republic with Espargaró a fraction behind on 1'57.538, that placed him 10th. But in the warmer FP2 this afternoon, Espargaró made a bigger improvement aboard his GSX-RR Suzuki with a time of 1'56.441 to finish seventh, with Vinales – who consistently filled the top-four positions for most of the session – ninth with a lap-time of 1'56.615.

Both adopted different strategies: Espargaró had to find back feeling with his injured hand – incurred last week in Austria - and check the pain level and also his strength, but he worked consistently on fast-laps as the feeling improved; while Viñales instead chose to give priority to the race-pace, without any time-attack attempt, but working on tyre durability throughout.

Davide Brivio – Team Manager:

“We’re happy that Aleix managed to ride, he’s suffering a little but he had a positive day of practice. He’s been fast and he’s getting a more-and-more positive feeling as he runs. He already found some improvements and so we’ll try to deliver him an even better machine for tomorrow. If we look at the classification, Maverick seems to be a little under expectations, but the truth is that he did a different job today, focusing on the pace-consistency rather than the single lap, also making some little experiments in terms of set-up and tyre management, so I would call this an ‘Investment Day’ for him. For these reasons my overview for today is positive; let’s work for even more performance tomorrow.”