Repsol Honda riders Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden stayed on at Le Mans today for a busy day of testing following yesterday’s French Grand Prix. Both riders focused on evaluating Michelin tyres and different chassis set-up solutions in preparation for the next MotoGP event at Mugello, Italy, on June 1. Pedrosa set the fastest lap of the tests, using qualifying tyres and the end of the day, while hard-working Hayden used race tyres throughout his impressive run of 113 laps.
Mugello is the first of a quick-fire run of six races over eight weekends. Hayden’s next duty, however, is this coming weekend, when he will ride a demo lap aboard a 2007 RC212V just before the start of the huge Indy 500 car race to promote September’s inaugural Indianapolis MotoGP event.
Dani Pedrosa, fastest lap: 1m 33.106s (77 laps)“I think we made some positive steps today. We focused on the front end, looking to improve feeling, so I tested several different front tyres and tried several different set-up solutions. I also tried some different electronics settings. I’m quite satisfied, we’ve learned a few things that should be useful at the next few races. It was difficult sometimes because the weather was quite cold, but finally it worked out okay. At the end of the day I used a qualifying tyre because we had to test something for qualifying. Now I’m looking forward to Mugello, a great track with an incredible atmosphere, where I hope we can have a better race.”
Nicky Hayden, fastest lap: 1m 34.752s (113 laps)“It was a hard weekend, today we found a couple of band aids for the problems we’ve had here. We only tested with race tyres and we improved our pace. I was able to go quicker than we went yesterday but still not enough. We tried a lot of solutions and I can’t really say we really found any cures for the braking stability and for getting the bike to enter the corner better. We went through a lot of stuff which at least we can now rule out. We tried mainly setting changes and a few tyres, which could possibly work well for us at other tracks, which we needed to get a little bit of data on. It looked like the sky could open up any time, it stayed dry but it wasn’t a day for the beach! I feel a little better now, so hopefully Mugello will go smoother for us.”
