Spain’s Jorge Lorenzo showed he is in no mood to ease the pressure on Yamaha teammate and world championship rival Valentino Rossi by dominating both practice sessions for the Aragon Grand Prix on Friday.

Lorenzo trails Rossi by 23 points with five races of the season to go and looks to be the favourite to add to his five wins already this year after setting a best time of 1min 47.517sec, nearly seven tenths of a second quicker than Rossi.

– Heikki: Watch out for Williams in high-energy Japanese GP
– Japan GP: Mercedes show pace in rain-hit practice
– Test Drive: Car of the week – Hyundai Sonata 2.0-litre Turbo

“Our rivals don’t sleep, so we know they will be strong and tomorrow’s pole will be fast,” said Lorenzo.

“We need to further improvements to the settings to be able to have even better pace.”

Britain’s Bradley Smith was third fastest on the Yamaha Tech 3.

Defending world champion Marc Marquez has won three of the last five races to maintain his outside hopes of a third consecutive title.

However, Honda struggled to match the pace set by Yamaha as Marquez ended the day with just the fifth fastest time behind teammate Dani Pedrosa in fourth.

“Today was a day in which we tried a lot of things out,” said Marquez.

“We must also take into account that Jorge is riding at a high level; he rode two great sessions today and is a small step ahead of us.

“Dani is also riding with a very strong pace. Let’s see if tomorrow we can continue to improve and get up to the same level.”