Starting from fifth, the new Bridgestone rider did not get the best of starts and finished the first lap in 🅺sixth, but he soon settled into a good rhythm and was stalking Fiat Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo, then in second, by lap three.

On the next lap he passed the home hero and set off after fellow Spaniard Dani Pedrosa. The Repsol Honda rider proved untouchable, but Rossi sat comfortably in second until crossing the line 🐟at the end of the penultimate lap, when he mistakenly thought the race had finished and began celebrating!

Rossi quickly rea𓆉lised his error and luckily had enough of a🔴 cushion over star rookie Lorenzo to hang on to second, eventually finishing 2.883 seconds behind Pedrosa.

"I'm really happy with this podium because, even though it hasn't been so many races since the last one, it's been quite a lot of months!" confessed the five-time MotoGP world champion. "I aജm also very happy to have reached 100 podiums in MotoGP; now I am wonde⛎ring if I can get to 200!

"It's a pity we couldn't win today and maybe I was a little bit too cautious at the start because I wanted to take care of my tyres, but in the end they worked very well from start to finish and so this ♛is great for the future," he explained. "It's always better to win but after the poor result in Qatar this is a very important second place to us, also because it's my first podium with Bridgestone."

Rossi has now moved up to third in the championship, after two of 18 rounds, 💮five points behind Lorenzo and ten from Pedrosa.

"My 💟bike and tyres are working very well, we're third in the championship with a very long way to🅰 go and I'm feeling quite confident."

"We want to look at this racꦕe in Jerez as the start of our championship," declared team manager Davide Brivio. "Of course we still have a lot to learn about the Bridgeston🐭e/Yamaha combination, but I think both parties did an excellent job here and Valentino rode a great race and kept a very consistent rhythm.

"[On Monday] we will havꦚe one day of testing and we will do our best in order to be in good shape for Estoril," he added. "This is Valentino's 100th podium and also the first one with Bridgestone, so it's a special day, but we hope that there willꦿ be many others!"

"It is great that Yamaha and Valentino have taken their first podium using our tyres," said Bridgestone's Hꦆiroshi Yamada. "It was even more pleasing that Valentino was the first of the four Yamaha riders to finish the race, so congratulations to them."

♕The next best Bridgestone rider after Rossi was Rizla Suzuki's Loris Capirossi, who finished ♌in fifth place - some 25 seconds behind The Doctor's M1.