Remy Gardner’s single podium at Assen was one of 🃏few highlights in Yamaha’s 2024 WorldSBK campaign, and so the progression of its performance from last year to this is a key subject entering the 2025 season.

For Gardner, this will be his third year in World Superbikes after moving from MotoGP for the 2023 s💮eason, but the Australian is yet to break through as one of the championship’s consistent front🍒 runners.

A fourth place at the end of the first day of this week’s Portimao test was, on paper, encouraging, especially with the GRT Yamaha rider admitting he wasn’t pushing at his maximum potential. The conditioꦯns, though, played their part in Gardner’s desire to push.

“It’s been a goo💫d day,” Gardner told WorldSBK.com.

“Unfortunately, we ꦓdidn’t getꦆ the whole day. It was raining in the morning, and it took a while to dry out.

“It did♒n’t dry out completely in the end, we had some 🥃rivers across the track.

“I didn’t push 100 per cent today just to avoid some crashes on the wet ꦬpatches. Even so, we could work in✅ the dry corners and work with some new test items we had that seemed to give me a good feeling.”

In t🍬erms of the specification of his YZF-R1, Gardner continued with back-to-back tesཧting items he already tried in Jerez.

“It was the s🔜ame items as Jerez,” he said. “We did some back-to-back testing, and, for me, we confirmed the feeling.

“Maybe the൲y made even more of a difference here, so it’s been a good day.”

With rain in the forecast for the second day of the test, Gard✅ner was cautious with his expectations.

“If it rains [on Wednesday], we’ll do a few laps,” he said. “Not too many but we’ll do some just to confirm that we feelings we had in the last two years and see if the new items are helping us in👍 the rain which we hope and expect.”