Camel Yamaha riders in a spin at Sachsenring

Camel Yamaha Team riders Valentino Rossi and Colin Edwards both face an uphill battle in tomorrow's German Grand Prix after struggling to come to terms with the undulating demands of the Sachsenring circuit in the final free practice and qualifying session today. Neither rider was able to find an adequate setting for the YZR-M1 in yesterday's opening sessions and despite making progress today they did not take the necessary steps forward required to make a challenge for the front row of the grid, which is headed by Dani Pedrosa (Honda) for the second successive race. As the action got underway below clear blue skies and pleasant summer temperatures of 22ºC, Rossi's main difficulty was balancing the intense force exerted on the front end of the bike at this circuit, a problem exacerbated by the extra rear grip offered by the softer qualifying tyres. Whilst the Italian is hopeful of working on a solution with his team overnight, Edwards is less optimistic having been unable to exactly pinpoint the root of his problems and leaving only tomorrow's 20-minute warm-up to clarify an adequate set-up and tyre choice for the race. Rossi will aim to make as much progress as possible early in the race as he starts from the fourth row in eleventh spot whilst Edwards has an even bigger challenge ahead as he looks to remount from a row further back in fifteenth. Valentino Rossi (11th - 1'22.868; 32 laps) "The race setting is not so bad but things were very different on the qualifying tyre. We are getting too much weight onto the front end of the bike and when the rear qualifying tyre grips so much this pushes the front even harder and I almost crashed a couple of times. My hand is still a bit sore but to be honest when I am riding I don't even think about it and this is not what is troubling us today. It looks like tomorrow will be tough because Dani Pedrosa has a very fast pace but I am starting from a long way back. Unfortunately I can't say that we are down in eleventh because I was unlucky; today we deserve to be in eleventh and we have a lot of work to do. It's difficult to overtake at this track and you need a good setting to make up positions in the race. At the moment our bike is not quite ready and this situation is not limited to today - it seems we have struggled in practice all year. Once again I need another great job from my mechanics tonight so that I can try and chase the lead group tomorrow." Colin Edwards (15th - 1'23.087; 29 laps) "I'm feeling disappointed and frustrated tonight because we've tried everything - changed the steering head column, the rear links, the swingarm links - but not got anywhere. The bike is a little better than yesterday but it is still not fast enough and when I'm following other guys around it seems as though they are running at a different track. Honestly, I think the team has worked harder here than at any other circuit this year but it's just not happening for us and we need a miracle now. The bike is a bit of a handful at the moment and the worrying thing is that I don't know exactly where we can find the improvement in time for tomorrow's race. Anyway, we'll keep working and see if we can come up with something in the morning." Davide Brivio - Camel Yamaha Team Director "Again it will be a difficult start to the race for us, with Valentino and Colin on the fourth and fifth rows. We are struggling with the qualifying tyre, even though Valentino's race pace is not so bad - very similar to Pedrosa and Hayden. The problem for him now is his position on the grid because it is a big disadvantage at such a tight circuit like this. We will do our best to make the right changes for him in the morning and hopefully we can come up with something for Colin too. We need a big effort from the whole team over the next 24 hours and I'm sure our riders will do their bit to perform." Confidence inspiring qualifying session for Tech 3 Yamaha Team Under the blazing German sunshine the solitary qualifying session for the MotoGP class was a confidence inspiring occasion for the Tech 3 Yamaha Team as lead rider, Carlos Checa qualified in 12th fastest position, just 1.1 seconds off pole position taken by Dani Pedrosa (Honda). In the final moments of the session, Carlos was denied the rare experience of being the leading Yamaha rider as world champion, Valentino Rossi relegated the experienced Spaniard one place on the grid by just 0.096 second. Teammate, James Ellison improved his time to move up the grid slightly but is nonetheless, disappointed that he ran out of time to improve his 18th place on the grid. Carlos Checa (12th, 1'22.964, 33 laps) "Of course for us personally this is good as we are quite close to Valentino and at this moment he is the best rider even if here his position is not his usual. This weekend we have worked quite well heading in the right direction and making advances with the Dunlop race tyres but we still have some limitations especially with the qualifying tyres. We are ready for tomorrow with a pretty good setup and hopefully we can build on what we have been doing in the recent races. We cannot be perfectly satisfied with this situation because it is clear that all riders on Yamaha are struggling around here. "Anyway for the race I am more confident than I am with qualifying. We have a good tyre and I think the setting we have chosen for the race we will have a good pace but hopefully even though warmup is early tomorrow there will be enough heat in the track to do some more final testing to make sure we have made the right decisions. I must get a good start as if we are too far back in the first corner with how close the lap times are it will be very difficult to move up many positions as it is also very hard to overtake around here. James Ellison (18th 1'24.464, 28 laps) "I'm not happy as although I dropped my times, yesterday's sessions were a loss. With the setup we had on Friday you kind of lose your confidence because we had so many problems it takes time to build up confidence again. If you arrive at a circuit and the bike works it's awesome because you can build on it all weekend but when you start bad like it's very difficult to get your head up to speed again. We've been chipping away and slowly building to the times we wanted to get but we really wanted to get into the 23 second bracket. We made a couple of mistakes with the last qualifier so I'm very disappointed with that to be honest. We had another tyre lined up but we just ran out of time. We might've gone quicker, we might've gone slower - who knows - it would've just been nice to try it. I'm not happy at all as I have only qualified five-tenths faster than I did last year and I'm on a bike way more capable than what I had. That's the result, so I have to live with it and try and get a good start to get away with them and hopefully move up a few places." Herve Poncharal - Tech3 Yamaha Team Director "It was another positive day for us as in the morning and afternoon Carlos was right up there with everybody else. For the majority of both sessions Carlos was the first Yamaha and it was only in the last seconds that Valentino got him but we are on the same row and in front of Colin Edwards. This makes us very happy - not to see Valentino and Colin so far back - but shows us the improvements that keep continuing with the Dunlop tyres. We are confident we can do a good first part of the race but because of the rain on Friday morning and all the setting changes we had to make, we didn't manage to do a full race distance in hot conditions as yesterday was a lot cooler on track. Tomorrow's forecast is a lot hotter than today, so we are a little bit concerned about the last 10 laps of the race because 30 laps around here on a high temperature track is very demanding on tyres - this is our main worry to see how those 10 laps unfold but I guess we have to wait and see. We have improved on our qualifying tyres but unfortunately the last run of Carlos for some reason we couldn't improve. If we had dropped another tenth of a second we could be a row closer because the lap times are so close but our main concern is durability and race distance more than grid position. It was also quite a good improvement from James. Yesterday he was nowhere and today he is running low to mid 1'24 second laps, which for MotoGP is a fairly decent lap time. Let's hope he can run at that pace for the entire race because there are guys in front of him that he can stay with and hopefully pass during the race.""    Round: 10 - 2006 MotoGP Sachsenring Circuit: Sachsenring Circuit Length: 3671 Lap Record: 1' 23.705 (Sete Gibernau, 2005) Fastest Lap Ever: 1' 21.815 (Daniel Pedrosa, 2006) Date: 15 July 2006 Temp: 22ºC Session 1 :  Pos.  Rider  Manufacturer  Nat.  1st Qualifying 1  D. Pedrosa  Honda  ESP   1' 21.815   2  K. Roberts  Team Roberts KR  USA   1' 21.907   3  N. Hayden  Honda  USA   1' 22.083   4  S. Nakano  Kawasaki  JPN   1' 22.273   5  L. Capirossi  Ducati  ITA   1' 22.329   6  M. Melandri  Honda  ITA   1' 22.420   7  S. Gibernau  Ducati  ESP   1' 22.469   8  C. Stoner  Honda  AUS   1' 22.577   9  J. Hopkins  Suzuki  USA   1' 22.701   10  M. Tamada  Honda  JPN   1' 22.866   11  V. Rossi  Yamaha  ITA   1' 22.868   12  C. Checa  Yamaha  ESP   1' 22.964   13  R. De Puniet  Kawasaki  FRA   1' 22.974   14  C. Vermeulen  Suzuki  AUS   1' 23.050   15  C. Edwards  Yamaha  USA   1' 23.087   16  T. Elias  Honda  ESP   1' 23.660   18  J. Ellison  Yamaha  GBR   1' 24,464.000