The JiR Team starts its engines in Valencia A three-day test session at the Ricardo Tormo circuit in Valencia opens the 2011 season for the JiR Team and its rider Alex De Angelis. The test will be a debut for the new machine, with a brand new livery and a tailor-made for the Sanmarinese rider after the good end to last season. Alex De Angelis, after a long winter break spent in training and improving his English language skills, is willing to get on his MotoBI again and discover the technical evolutions that the team has developed for him. Gianluca Montiron – Team Principal “I’m satisfied that I found an agreement with most of our Partners who have given us their trust for this second year. We designed a MotoBI that will be easily recognizable on the track and we have the objective to compete among the top teams in each and every race, trying to find consistent performances. We are here in the line up with a renewed vigor and ready to exploit these three winter tests (Valencia, Estoril, Jerez) to prepare for the race debut in Qatar which is on March 20th. The early two sessions will not be relevant for timing but will help us make the selection of the technical package we will use during the season. All teams will use their own engines so perhaps the performances will not be comparable. On our side we have two machines to make a comparison between the base of the 2011 model already used in last races of last season and some further evolutions developed by our technicians.” Alex De Angelis – Pilota “I spent the winter season to keep and improve my physical shape and I feel ready, even if as always the best training is to ride. I’m here in Valencia with the objective of getting back some confidence on the track and finalize my preparation, and to concentrate on the important duty of testing the technical evolutions that have been developed for the new bike and to gather data to be compared with what we found in 2010. All of us will test with our own engines, so we’re not going to focus on comparisons with other teams but with the references we took last year with our machine. After these two sessions we’ll have clearer ideas and with the official engines that are coming in Jerez we’ll have more precise directions about the path that has to be taken. Today I ran 46 laps exploiting the warmest hours of the day. We didn’t have the official timing so we can’t make any comparison with other riders but my feeling is that we have already improved our own performances compared to last year. I spent the whole day in finding back the feeling with my MotoBI and tomorrow we will start to apply some little modifications in order to become step by step even more competitive.”