Taking advantage of a day of sunshine in Malaysia, the Ducati Marlboro squad started the 2nd official test with positive spirits. For Valentino Rossi, he spent 53 Laps calculating a base setting with which he and his engineers will continue on with throughout the test. At the end of the session, the Italian sat 9th on the timesheet.
“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.” said Rossi.
“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.” he continued.
Teammate Nicky Hayden also continued with setup work, mainly to reduce unwanted movement on his GP11. Despite a slow fall just before the lunch break, Hayden finished the session in 12th place.
“It's good to be back at Sepang, working on and developing the GP11.” said Hayden “We spent the morning checking a few things and confirming what we had learned the last time we were here. 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.” he finished.
