Cal Crutchlow sees his performance on new tyres as the big area for improvement after day one of testing at Sepang. The Briton was tenth fastest, almost a second and a half down on fellow Honda rider Marc Marquez, but Crutchlow didn’t feel he extracted the maximum performance from the new rubber, something he will look to work on later in the week.
“Today was obviously a good familiarisation day from my point of view with CWM-LCR Honda Team. We got back to working ways quite well. I was happy but really rusty from the winter off. We did a good job, we made a lot of laps on used tyres and the lap time was the same as what I did with the new tyres, so we need to keep improving with the new tyre and be able to feel a little bit more comfortable on the bike. In the last run we seemed to have some sort of problem to not be able to take advantage of the lap time, but I was happy overall and it was nice to get back on the bike in Malaysia today.”
Many eyes were focused on the sister CWM-LCR Honda of Jack Miller as the Australian youngster continued preparations for his maiden MotoGP campaign after stepping up from Moto3. Miller went some way to silencing the doubters by setting the 19th quickest time, leaving him as the highest-placed rookie.
“I’m very happy with the result today”, Miller commented. “We started off where we left things at the end of last year and I’m really happy with how the bike is working. The team is working great as always and today we tested many things. Without electronics, I’m still trying to adjust my riding style to fit the MotoGP bike and tomorrow we might be able to start working with some electronics and start making some more steps forward. For today we are really happy. We are learning to conserve the tyres better and making a good job and looking forward to the rest of the test.”