Repsol Honda riders Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden were back to work at Jerez today following yesterday’s Spanish GP which Pedrosa won in brilliant style, Hayden…
Pedrosa, whose first win of the year moved him into the World Championship lead, used the day to improve his knowledge of his RC212V with which he had limited preseason testing time due to a broken hand sustained in January. Hayden evaluated new parts and new settings, working hard to continue the impressive progress he made over the Spanish GP weekend, during which he raced a new chassis for the first time. Both riders used only race tyres today, while the fastest seven riders used qualifying tyres for their best laps.Dani Pedrosa, fastest lap: 1m 40.166s (lap 60 of 69)Today we worked on basic setup to help us get more familiar with the bike, to know our package better and to find the best direction so we can continue improving. It’s the kind of work we usually do at preseason tests but we weren’t able to do this year because of my injury. It was a necessary job with a lot of stops in the pits but I think it was very useful. We also started working on tyres with Michelin and we will focus on tyre testing all day tomorrow. It will be a very important day, crucial for our development programme.Nicky Hayden, fastest lap: 1m 40.389s (lap 25 of 80)We learned some stuff today, we were able to run pretty decent and consistent laps using reference tyres and we got some good data, so quite a positive day all in all. We had nothing major to test, just some different clutch options to get into the corners a little bit better and some general setup options, looking for a bit of edge traction to help save the tyre over race distance. We’ll come back again tomorrow, get another full day and just work our way through some more options.
