Vinales spent much of the final day running at Losail languishing towards the bottom of the timesheets, before a late surge moved him up to fifth place.

It was the latest setback for the 23-year-old in what has been a troubled winter, with Vinales declaring the previous Thailand test the "worst" of his Yamaha career.

Reflecting on the three days in Qatar, Vinales said he felt that Yamaha went in the wrong direction, resulting in a significant portion of the test effectively being wasted.

"In this test we took the opposite direction to the correct one, and it was really difficult because I couldn't push or get the best out of myself," admitted Vinales.

"The bike has a set-up, you have to adapt to that and extract 100 percent from it. We modified the bike because I felt like we lost a day and a half.

"I'm not riding at 100 percent. We got lost and I could not push.

"That means I have room for improvement and especially the bike has room for improvement. We are far from the level we can reach."

Vinales said that his late move up the times was down to him reverted to the set-up he used on the first day of the Qatar test, when he was fastest.

"I only felt good in the last half hour of the afternoon," added the Spaniard, who was 0.442s slower than Johann Zarco's 2016-spec Yamaha on Saturday.

"We changed the set-up in the last 40 minutes and went back to [what we used on] the first day.

"It felt like a different bike – not as good as last year's, but if I had more time I could have gone faster."

Additional reporting by Oriol Puigdemont