Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden talk about Day 1 testing

Posted: Tuesday 22 February 2011 by Toni M.

Valentino Rossi still has a lot of work to do in finding some form on the Ducati GP11. The Italian rider took the 9th spot in today’s first day of testing at the Sepang 2 test, and despite being the best Ducatista on the grid and the only one to make the top ten, he was still considerably off place, lagging more than a second behind Casey Stoner’s best time.

According to Rossi he wasn’t even looking to put in a hot lap, infact his best lap was done during the morning session and the Italian didn’t even try a run with the softer tire that many riders used.

“We can be satisfied with today as a first day, because we’re a second from the top, like we were at the end of the first test but without trying a late ‘time attack’ with the soft tyre like the others did. For the most part today, I was between fifth and sixth place, which is the goal we had set. I’m still losing about three tenths due to the shoulder, because I’m still stronger in the left turns, whereas I’m normally the opposite; the rest we’ll have to find by working on the bike. I’m also happy because we spent all our time on the hard tyres, which we struggled with before today. In the end, we chose one of the two setups that we had settled upon at the last test, and that will now be our base to work from, and the one on which we’ll concentrate our efforts in the next couple of days.”

Nicky Hayden completed the first day down in twelfth, a big 1.693 off the pace, but has hammered out some of the previous chattering that hampered him in the previous test while adding a small crash earlier in the morning.

“It’s good to be back at Sepang, working on and developing the GP11. We spent the morning checking a few things and confirming what we had learned the last time we were here”, said Hayen. “Everything pretty much went according to schedule, except I had a little crash in Turn 1 toward the end of the morning session. It was really hot, and I lost the front and tipped over, but I was going slow and didn’t do any damage to myself or the bike. Today we experienced less chatter than we had last time, so that’s quite good. We need to keep reducing that over the next two days and also find some more traction, so we’ve got plenty to keep us busy.”