Shinya Nakano took his Konica Minolta Honda to 10th place in today’s qualifying session for the German MotoGP race. It was yet another close qualifying hour with the top 16 riders covered by around eight-tenths of a second! Today Shinya tried a harder compound Michelin tyre to suit the warmer conditions, made some suspension adjustments and altered the gearing of his Honda RC212V MotoGP machine. At the end of the hour-long session and on qualifying tyres, Shinya shaved around a second and a quarter off his previous best time to head-up row four of the grid for tomorrow’s 30-lap race.
Gianluca Montiron – Team Manager Konica Minolta Honda “Considering our situation I think today hasn’t been too bad as this is a circuit that promotes close racing and similar lap-times – which is why we’re not so far behind – just 0.5s. At the end of the afternoon’s session Shinya was faster with a qualifying tyre but unfortunately in the second part of the track he’s been losing a bit of time, so perhaps we will improve this for tomorrow, as currently he’s not able to ride the machine the way he wants to. In T2 section, Shinya was one of the slowest riders, but in T3 Shinya was around 3rd quickest, so it’s clear where we want to improve for the race tomorrow. This is a very physical circuit for the rider, but the key point tomorrow will be the tyres: particularly in the last sector of the track. Also the temperature may be higher in the race than today so we need to adapt our machine for the conditions we will experience in the race tomorrow.”
Shinya Nakano – Rider, Konica Minolta Honda (59 laps – 1’ 22.969”)“If I look behind me there are some very fast riders! My qualifying lap was not perfect, I made some small mistakes but I felt like I finally had the chance to push harder. We were faster than yesterday even with race tyres and we’ve improved the gearbox settings for some of the corners and altered the suspension so we’ve got good braking stability now, which is good. On some of the high-speed corners I’m slower than other guys so we will try a different rear setting for tomorrow. Our second sector is a little slow, but I’ve regained confidence in some of the corners and am riding like usual again. We’re still missing something, but slowly we are making small steps forward.”
Giulio Bernardelle – Technical Director, Konica Minolta Honda
“Today for us was not so bad. We have seen higher temperatures than yesterday and for this reason we went with a harder compound tyre than Friday. Our situation was positive with this tyre and we think it should be good for the race. We finalised the choice for the race tyre this morning then changed the gearing in both 3rd and 4th gears to try and help us in the second and third sectors where there’s a long series of left corners and this afternoon things were better. In the afternoon session we made only some small adjustments. Basically with the first qualifying tyre we were not so lucky as Shinya had traffic problems, but with the second soft tyre things were much better, although with another tyre I think the third row would have been possible. It is good to see that we are improving step-by-step. We hope to find another 0.3-0.4s tomorrow, if so then we can be in the top 10 in the race.”
German GP - Qualifying Practice Classification:
1) Casey Stoner - Ducati 1’ 22.384”
2) Dani Pedrosa - Honda 1’ 22.388”
3) Marco Melandri - Honda 1’ 22.397”
4) Randy de Puniet - Kawasaki 1’ 22.539”
5) John Hopkins - Suzuki 1’ 22.561”
10) Shinya Nakano - Honda 1’ 22.969”
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