Having been second fastest on Wednesday, Rossi struggled for pace from lunchtime onwards during the second day of running in Australia.

He dropped down to eighth by the end of the day with a 1m29.674s, just under a tenth quicker than his best effort from Wednesday.

In comparison, Vinales went over a second quicker than he did previously, finishing the second day comfortably on top of the times.

Rossi admitted that his lack of pace affected his programme, and that the team will look for answers in the hope of being closer to the front on Friday.

“It was a difficult day for us, especially in the afternoon,” said Rossi.

“This morning wasn’t so bad, we tried some different tyres but especially we worked on pace and it was quite good. This afternoon, we had some important tests to try on a long run and tried to modify something in the bike, but unfortunately it didn’t work very well. I wasn’t fast enough.

“It looks like we followed the wrong direction. After this interview I will go back to the box and try and understand for tomorrow. We hope that we can improve.”

Better understanding for Vinales

Pacesetter Vinales was happy with his day’s work at Phillip Island, admitting that he didn’t sleep easy last night after being concerned with his work on Wednesday.

“Yesterday I went to sleep really bad, because I didn’t put the tyre [on] and I didn’t understand where I was,” he said.

“This morning when I pushed and I saw [1m]28, I say ‘okay, maybe yesterday was not a good day’.

“But anyway we did a good job today, not only for the 28s, but because we did many 29-low, 29-mediums with a lot of laps on the tyre.

“We need to continue like this. We have to improve, the rear grip especially from Lap 10 or 15 to the end of the race, we have to work a little more.

“All the work we’ve done these days was to improve that. With 27 laps on the tyre I was doing [1m]30.0, so for that I’m quite happy.”

Additional reporting by Oriol Puigdemont