Today at the Sepang circuit in Malaysia, the Konica Minolta Honda team made more progress with their new rider Shinya Nakano in the first major test of the 2007 MotoGP season. Today’s work centred around testing new Michelin tyres and working on suspension as Nakano aims to get a good base setting as he adapts to his new Honda RC212V, Michelin tyres and his new team. Shinya completed 70 laps in good weather conditions and finished the day 12th overall in unofficial timing.
Gianluca Montiron – Team Manager Konica Minolta Honda“I’m happy, as today we’ve improved. We modified the suspension a little bit and then we mostly worked on testing Michelin tyres. I think it’s clear that riders who have had the opportunity of testing the new prototypes here in November have an advantage and this can be clearly seen in the results. We are not too worried by this, as we know that the advantages of having tested here before are giving a benefit in improved lap-times to these riders. We are confident that tomorrow the difference in time will be lower than today. With a new rider for the team to work with and for Shinya to have to learn to work with his new team, new bike and new tyres, we knew we’d need much more time, which is why we planned a lot of pre-season testing. We are confident this will give Shinya the best opportunity to be competitive by the first race of the season in March.”
Shinya Nakano – Rider, Konica Minolta Honda “Most time of the time today was dedicated to testing some new Michelin front tyres. Unfortunately it was difficult to get confidence in the front-end of the bike and I struggled a lot with chatter from the front of the bike. Because of this I was not able to keep up the corner speed you need with these new 800cc machines. Apart from this, as a team I can see that we are working in the right direction to solve this problem. Compared to my first test on the new bike in Jerez I have a much better feeling with the 212V and I’m starting to get used to the Honda, even if I have many new things to learn on this bike! Many other riders have recorded good times today, but I’m not worried, I’m concentrating on finding a good base setting for the new 212V and from there we will work on getting a good lap time. I know some riders are struggling with the fact that the new 800cc machines are much smaller than the 990cc bikes, but my feeling is that I’m very happy with the smaller, more compact size of the RC212V as it suits me very well.”
Yutaka Hirano – Head Technician, Konica Minolta Honda“Today we have completely dedicated our time to tyre testing, with this work mainly concentrating on the front-end of the new RC212V. This has set us some chattering problems, but we have made some improvements on front suspension settings and we’re confident that we’ll find the overall solution. Tomorrow we plan to work on the electronics system on the bike as the new software gives us many possibilities for adjustments, but must be correctly set-up and fine-tuned for the rider and this takes time. We will start our work on this first thing tomorrow. By working on this we are sure that our overall lap time will be better. I’m happy with the team who are working very hard to give Nakano the best machine set-up possible.”
Related Linkswww.konicaminolta.com/motogp
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