The Repsol Honda Team waved a fond farewell to the Ricardo Tormo circuit today having completed the first full day of testing with the new-for-2008 RC212V race machine. Nicky Hayden and Dani Pedrosa carried out further evaluation work aboard the 800cc V4 prototype which Honda unveiled to the world yesterday. The pair also undertook a programme of tyre testing for Michelin using the 2007 machine with both riders circulating inside the lap record of 1m 32.748s set by Pedrosa on his way to victory in Sunday’s Grand Prix of Valencia.
Hayden completed 92 laps of the 4.005km (2.487-mile) circuit today and finished second fastest with a lap of 1m 32.434s. Pedrosa wasn’t far behind his American team-mate, stopping the clock at 1m 32.718s. With the sun finally setting on the 2007 MotoGP World Championship, the Repsol Honda squad now packs the crates and heads to Sepang in Malaysia for a three-day test beginning on Thursday November 15.Nicky Hayden Best lap time: 1m 32.434s – 92 laps Today was pretty productive. We spent most of the day on the new machine and made some decent progress. We were focussed on trying to get the engine to run a little smoother at the top end and we’ve still got some work to do on that front. But it’s early days and we’ve gathered some useful data that the HRC engineers can use to hopefully improve things before we test at Sepang next week. I really like thechassis which is more balanced than the old machine. Not so much weight pitches to the front under braking and it wheelies less too. Overall I’m pretty happy with how this first test has gone and we’ve definitely got a better base compared with this time last year. Today I also did a long run on the 2007 bike to get some comparison data and I was still a little faster on the old machine – by about half a second – so we need to try to close that gap when we get down to work this winter.Dani Pedrosa Fastest lap time: 1m 32.718s – 88 laps We’ve been testing a lot of things today and jumping from the old machine to the new one to gather comparison data. I think we’ve done a lot of useful work. One and a half days is not a lot of time to fully test a completely new machine but now we need to analyse the data we collected and come to some conclusions about the direction to take the machine. The feel of the new bike is quite different both in terms of the engine characteristics and the riding position. From the outside it looks bigger – and it is a bit bigger but it’s still OK for me. I didn’t focus on lap times today because the most important thing is getting familiar with the new bike and learning where we’re going to develop it. Anyway the lap times are not so bad for the first test. We also tested tyres for Michelin today, mainly with the old bike because we have a lot of reference data for that bike.
