The Chang International Circuit in Buriram welcomed teams and riders this week with continuous rain. Yet, on the first day of action, participants found a mainly dry track for the MotoGP class today, which saw riders getting re-used to the Thai venue in two interesting Free Practice sessions.

Darryn Binder took his time this morning to relearn the 4.6-kilometer-long track aboard his Yamaha YZR-M1. The MotoGP rookie though managed to do a huge step from the first to the second Free Practice. He improved his lap time by 1.582 seconds, eventually losing out on the top by just 1.086 seconds. He unfortunately registered a fall at the end of the second session but still managed to move up from P23 to P21 in the combined practice times.

DARRYN BINDER

“It’s good to be back here in Buriram, I really enjoyed riding the track on the MotoGP bike. This morning, we just focused on learning the track and just doing as many laps as we could on one set of tyres. Getting ready for the afternoon and just hoping for the weather to be good to us, we got really lucky and we were able to get two dry sessions and I made a really good improvement from FP1 to FP2. But unfortunately right at at the end when I was trying to do the final time attack, I crashed on the hot lap. A very strange crash and an unfortunate way to end the day but I’m happy with the work we did in FP2. I feel like we’ve got some good potentials on this track and hoping that tomorrow we can make some more steps forward.”