Motorland Aragon, Spain

Jorge Lorenzo ended the second and final day of the Aragon MotoGP test on top of the timesheets, getting well inside Casey Stoner's pole record from 2011, but still a quarter of a second slower than Dani Pedrosa's time from Tuesday. Pedrosa finished with the 2nd fastest time on Wednesday, ahead of LCR Honda's Stefan Bradl and the second factory Yamaha of Ben Spies. Jonathan Rea ended the day in 5th, but improved his time from Tuesday.

HRC issued the following press release after the first day of testing at Aragon today:

After recovering its breath from two back-to-back weekends of racing with a hop across the Atlantic in between, the MotoGP world is slowly getting back into the testing groove. The factory Honda and Yamaha teams are circulating at Aragon, joined by Stefan Bradl, while at Mugello, Ducati is once again holding auditions for the Ducati Junior team, with Andrea Iannone turning laps alongside Michele Pirro, currently riding the FTR Honda CRT bike for the San Carlo Gresini Honda team. Elsewhere, Danilo Petrucci is heading to Vairano in Italy to test the Suter BMW, ahead of a planned switch by the IODA Racing team from the IODA Aprilia to the BMW-powered Suter at Misano.

The Motorland Aragon circuit is seeking a 15% cut in the cost of organizing the Aragon round of MotoGP. According to the regional newspaper El Periodico de Aragon, the government of the autonomous region of Aragon, who finance the circuit, are in an advanced stage of negotiations with Dorna to cut the sanctioning fee for the event. The cuts were necessary as a result of the dire economic situation in Spain, and the strain that is placing on the budgest of the autonomous regions.

The government of Aragon is scheduled to pay 49.7 million euros for the contract with Dorna for the privilege of organizing the race through 2016. The 15% reduction could save the regional government over 6 million euros over the next five years. Though Dorna has agreed in principle to the cuts, according to El Periodico de Aragon, the current sticking points are the exact percentage of the reduction, and whether the fee will be reduced for the 2012 race, or whether it will only be applied from next season onwards.

PTR's Simon Buckmaster is the first to comment on Kenan Sofuoglu's “outright dangerous” actions against Fabien Foret during round 7 of the World Supersport championship. Sofuoglu, who is currently undergoing knee surgery, appeared to deliberately charge into Foret down the fast back straight at Aragon.

The text of the Press Release follows:

Sofuoglu penalty not enough

WE all saw the Kenan Sofuoglu incident last weekend at Aragon that was clearly no accident as he simply looked across and rode into Fabien Foret.

The race direction then put the incident under investigation and imposed a drop three places penalty. Now the rules say a rider has five-laps to take a penalty and with only four-laps left by the time the penalty was imposed Kenan simply did not have to take it. Strictly speaking under the rules he completed the race before his last opportunity to drop back. He was lucky here as he clearly had no intention of doing so, a point shown by him trying to go into the winner enclosure at the end of the race.

Press releases from Infront Motor Sports and the World Superbike teams after the official Pirelli test at Aragon, where the new 17-inch tires were debuted:

Sykes fastest on new 17-inch wheels and tyres

MotorLand Aragon (Spain), Monday 2 July - Tom Sykes (Kawasaki Racing Team) set the fastest time of the one-day Infront Motor Sports official tests on the new generation of 17-inch wheels and Pirelli tyres which were seen for the first time today. His lap of 1 minute 57.254 seconds compares favourably with the existing race lap record, set on race tyres not qualifying rubber, of 1 minute 58.251 seconds.

“We’ve worked hard today again after a difficult day yesterday, when unfortunately I believe that the wind affected us more than our competitors,” said Sykes. “We did a run this morning to confirm our race pace and I did a 58.8 on lap 17 so it’s a completely different story with no wind. The plan was to test the 17” tyre in the morning but we wanted to confirm what happened yesterday, then this afternoon we kept the same settings and tested the new size wheel and tyres which I was pleasantly surprised with.”

At the second World Superbikes race weekend at Aragon, The heat of the past two days was tempered today with a cool breeze that lowered the temperature and pushed the bikes hard down the back straight into the disc-crushing hairpin. The conditions were just right to give us good, close racing.

World Superbikes at its best is close physical racing between determined riders on near-equal machinery, and race two was exactly that.

The World Supersport race was red flagged after two riders collided at the start. This would not be the only point Race Direction were required to intercede in the racing today.

A tailwind on the back straight meant teams were overgearing their bikes to take advantage of the increased top speed potential of the more powerful bikes, with Chaz Davies managing 339kmh in the morning's warm-up.

The Spanish hot weather struck Aragon again, with track temperatures starting at 37°C in the morning reaching 58°C in the afternoon.

Press releases from the World Superbike and World Supersport teams after qualifying at Aragon:

It took a while for the Supersport riders to get started, with a huge spread across the top ten until close to the end of the session, but once they did, six riders were under the 2:03 mark.