The first of the three days of MotoGP official testing at the Losail International Circuit was really positive for Loris Baz, the only Reale Avintia Racing team representative today at Qatar. His teammate Hector Barbera decided to stay at home last Monday and take more time to recover from his collarbone, after only eight days since his surgical intervention.

Loris Baz felt really comfortable riding his Ducati Desmosedici GP15 from the first time out, and he was in the top ten with two hours remaining. The Reale Avintia Racing French rider did only 31 laps in the opening day at Qatar, as he decided to stop before schedule when the track temperature started to drop down. He had very good feeling with the bike and tomorrow he hopes to improve even more. Baz finished 17th only 1.3s from Andrea Dovizioso, the fastest today riding the factory Ducati.

“The first day was really good. I did not have such a good feeling with the bike since one year ago and from the first laps I was going fast. Today I did not many laps, but this it is not so bad as we were able to keep some tyres for the next two days. Overall I’m very happy and we need to keep in the same direction tomorrow, try to improve even more and solve the issues we have in some turns, but I’m happy with the feeling I had today. We had not many stuff to test, because the base set up was working from the beginning, so I just tried Michelin tyres and I basically concentrated in getting some feeling with the track. Tomorrow we want to do a race simulation, and we will see how it goes.”