Aaron Yates was comfortable, confident and quick on his new BCL Motorsports/GPTech GP212 MotoGP Claiming Rule Team (CRT) racebike during a one-day test August 11 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway to prepare for his wild card entry in the August 17-19 Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix. Riding on the track and Bridgestone MotoGP tires for the first time, Yates lapped the 2.6-mile infield road course in an unofficial 1:45.8 on his Suzuki GSX-R1000-powered machine. Casey Stoner, riding an 800cc Honda prototype racebike, set pole time for the 2011 Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix with a 1:38.850, putting the 107% qualifying cut-off time at 1:45.770. Yates’ time was on the wrong side of that cut-off and the new 1000cc MotoGP factory prototype racebikes will most likely go even quicker during the Red Bull Indianapolis GP, but his performance on the unfamiliar and dirty track on a bike with an AMA-spec Superbike engine after two years of recovering from a terrible leg break was impressive, to say the least. It also compared well with the performance of Steve Rapp, who did a best unofficial time of 1:45.4 on his Attack Performance Racing APR at the same test. “The bike felt good to me. I felt good,” Yates told Roadracingworld.com. “I’m real happy with my riding. I felt like I was riding pretty good. The longer I was on the bike the more and more I was getting comfortable. I feel like I was pushing pretty hard. It would be nice to be on something a little more racy, you know, compared to the bike I was on and what Steve’s [Rapp] got. It looked like a full-on racebike. I look at my bike and it looks like a regular ol’ streetbike, you know? It would be nice if we could get the fuel tank down low and a few different things that would try and help it get around the track faster and easier. But I felt for the amount of time that’s been put into getting the thing together I think it’s a pretty decent package.” Yates said his team is planning to use more powerful engines during the race weekend, that they have a few more things to try and that he can find more time to cut in the final complex of corners. “Once we get some more bikes out there and get some rubber down,” said Yates, “I think it’ll come around pretty good and we should be able to go faster.” One thing Yates was definitely happy to report was the fact that his injured leg is no longer injured. “The leg feels pretty good,” said Yates. “It’s no issue on the bike. It may get sore every once in a while, but it’s really not an issue. It feels pretty good. These last couple of months I’ve gotten some good confidence in the bones, been trying to train pretty hard, been doing a lot of bicycling and stuff just trying to get ready to go ride. “When this opportunity came up to race this thing I was like, ‘It sounds like fun. Why not? So I’ve got to give it a try.’ I wasn’t sure it was really going to happen or not, but Geoff Maloney, Mark Junge, Tony [Pogue], Mike Fitzgerald put a lot of effort into it and really wanted to make it happen. Thanks to them for the opportunity for getting me out there, for giving me the ride. It should be pretty interesting to see what happens. Like I said, I wish we had something a little better, a little faster, a little more racy. I’m just going to go out there and ride to my best level and see what happens.”