Morning rainfall at Phillip Island today gave Nicky Hayden the opportunity to evaluate his 2008 Repsol Honda RC212V for the first time in the rain. The 2006 MotoGP World Champion took to the wet track at 11am, tak ing the opportunity to get a feel for the V4 in low-grip conditions.
Morning rainfall at Phillip Island today gave Nicky Hayden the opportunity to evaluate his 2008 Repsol Honda RC212V for the first time in the rain. The 2006 MotoGP World Champion took to the wet track at 11am, tak ing the opportunity to get a feel for the V4 in low-grip conditions. The rain stopped at lunch time but the track wasn’t dry enough to continue with dry track testing until 3.40pm when Hayden returned to action on slicks.
Hayden had a very productive day and was happy with the bike’s performance in the rain. His dry-track pace was similar to yesterday’s despite cooler conditions and less traction following the rainfall. Tomorrow he will continue working on chassis settings and testing more tyres.
Nicky Hayden, fastest lap: 1m 31.373s (lap 71 of 72)
“You know, we get a lot more dry races than wet, so the dry’s more important, but we’ve got to be ready for everything, so today was useful. We were able to check the bike in the wet and make a few little adjustments. Conditions stayed stable long enough to do that, which a lot of times in the rain is hard, you know, it’s dry, it’s wet, it’s pouring, it’s deep water, but today it stayed prett y stable so we got to check some stuff. The general feeling in the wet was okay, then in the afternoon it dried out enough to get some dry lap times. My best time was about the same as I did yesterday, I wasn’t able to improve, though conditions were a little bit cooler and not as good today, so I think that’s a positive. We’re not where we need to be on race pace consistently. I tried to test a few tyres today but at the moment we’re struggling for traction on the edge. So we need to have a meeting tonight with Michelin and maybe try something completely different. We struggled a bit here when we were here for the race, so we need to definitely address the problem tomorrow. We get one more day at it and hopefully the weather looks a lot better, so we’ll co me in here and try to make a big step forward”.
