Casey Stoner kept the Repsol Honda team at the top of the time sheets today, claiming the best lap time around the Sepang track. Stoner set a 2'01" lap time around the Sepang track, leading his teammate Dani Pedrosa to a Repsol Honda 1-2 on the first day of the MotoGP test.
"We had a really good day today, from the beginning I felt more comfortable with the bike again, like I understood the bike a little better,” said Stoner. “We managed to work on set-up but we are still doing a chassis comparison, finding strong points and weak points on both. It's difficult to choose one or the other, whatever set-up we throw at them we seem to be able to run pretty similar lap times. We're very happy with the progress we made today and everything and everybody seems to be working well.”
The two Honda riders were followed by two Yamaha bikes, as Jorge Lorenzo and Colin Edwards rode their M1s into third and fourth. Lorenzo finished .48 seconds behind Stoner's time, and Edwards was another two-tenths of a second back.
“Today was a good day for me, we worked on the traction to improve it from the previous test which helped us a lot in the set-up, I'm now very satisfied with it,” said Lorenzo.
The third Repsol Honda rider followed Edwards to take fifth for the day. Andrea Dovizioso beat out Ben Spies by .06 for the fifth place spot. Spies was followed by a couple more Hondas, making it five RC212Vs inside the top 8. The final two Hondas were ridden by the San Carlo Honda Gresini pair Hiroshi Aoyama and Marco Simoncelli.
The highest ranking Ducati bike was driven by Valentino Rossi. Rossi is still recovering from shoulder surgery, but he looked pretty comfortable around the Sepang track. Rossi finished with a 2’01.999 lap time, 1.012 seconds behind the leader.
The top ten was finished off by Alvaro Bautista with the Rizla Suzuki team.
"Today I wanted to ride in a calm way and concentrate on the details that we had to work on," Bautista said. "We didn’t make an exciting lap-time today but we improved the bike, especially on corner exit where it now feels much smoother. I’m looking forward to pushing a bit harder tomorrow.”
