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Almost one second separated Repsol Honda riders Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden during the opening day of testing at Sepang III today, as the factory RC211Vs were seen for the first time in their new-for-2006 paint scheme.
Fastest of the pair was new signing Pedrosa, the reigning 250cc World Champion, began his third full test on the Honda by continuing to acclimatise to a MotoGP machine, honing chassis and suspension settings and testing new Michelin tyres. The Spaniard began the day conservatively and slowly upped the pace to eventually set a fastest lap at 2min 1.89secs from 87 circulations - making him second fastest, behind only Marco Melandri.
"Today was not too bad. At the beginning the track was a little bit slippery but it got better," stated Dani. "We were working on chassis and suspension settings in the morning and then after lunch we tested some tyres for Michelin until the rain stopped us. At the beginning my times weren't so good, but we improved little by little. We have tested here three times and I'm gaining good experience. I still have to work on my strength and fitness, but I think with the time we have we can achieve it. And I've now got a riding position I'm happy with."
However, Hayden was far less pleased with his day - spent further developing the 2006 RCV and testing Michelin race tyres - as traction problems caused by high track temperatures left the American slightly frustrated. He also admitted that his feed-back was not up to the usual standard.
"I'm not completely satisfied with the day to be honest with you," said Nicky, who was eighth fastest. "At the start I just didn't have a good feeling with the traction. As the day went on we kept working hard and chipped away and found some stuff and I was able to get into the 2s (2mins 2secs laps) when it was still really hot, so that was positive, but we weren't where we needed to be today.
"I'm not pointing the finger. We're all in it together and to be honest the rider wasn't getting around as good as he should have, and my information wasn't that great. Still, we definitely got some stuff we can build on - we changed some offset settings which helped me with front feeling in the slow corners," he added.
"This test is very important for Honda and today the track was very hot which didn't help the lap times," said team manager Makoto Tanaka. "Again, Nicky had many things to test. His time wasn't the fastest, but I'm not worried about this, it's a three day test and we have more new things to try tomorrow."
Fresh from their outing in Qatar last week, Camel Yamaha riders Valentino Rossi and Colin Edwards began their last three-day test in Sepang today with both riders focusing almost entirely on ironing out the small vibration problems they have been suffering from lately.
As such, fast lap times were not the aim of the day, but both remained within official lap record pace as Edwards set the third fastest time, behind the Hondas of Marco Melandri and Dani Pedrosa, whilst Rossi was 0.2secs slower than his team-mate for the fifth fastest time.
"Today we worked almost entirely on trying to solve the vibration problems that we have had," confirmed Rossi after his 54 laps. "We changed many things, tried various different settings and collected a lot of important information throughout the day. Now we are looking forward to using all this information over the next two days and we are confident that we are close to fixing the problem.
"Once we've been able to fix it, we will be able to use this bike to its full potential. Yamaha has done a great job and the potential of this bike is very high, it's a big improvement to last year's M1 and I am sure that once we've solved this one remaining issue, things will be very good," insisted the Italain, who also tried a new fairing (middle pic).
"It was seriously hot out there today and pretty exhausting! Today we concentrated on fixing the little bit of chatter we've had and played around with some front fork settings, just trying to dial it in," added Edwards. "We made some good progress and we have a new front-end setting to try in the morning; we hope that this will be the final key. Honestly we didn't really concentrate much on lap times but it seems that they came anyway, so I'm pretty happy!"
"Of course fixing this vibration is now our main focus and today we worked a lot with the entire team to try to find the right way forward," stated team director Davide Brivio. "We had great cooperation between the two riders and both crews, exchanging information and experience and this is very important for the team's progress. We've been working on data collection today and we will continue tomorrow, trying some new things and gathering more information to help us. We've already done many days testing with this new bike and mostly it's going very well, now we have two more days here to continue with our improvement.
