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The Fiat Yamaha Team's Valentino Rossi and
Jorge Lorenzo rounded off a successful three
days testing at Sepang with another
impressive day's work today with the pair
topped the timesheets. |
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Valentino Rossi rounded off a successful three days in
Malaysia with another impressive day's testing at the
Sepang International Circuit today. The high point of
the Italian's day was his race simulation, when he
lapped consistently under lap record pace and improved
on his time from the January test, as well as on last
year's race time.
Rossi was pleased both with the
performance of his 2008-spec M1 and with his Bridgestone
tyres, today's results indicating that he and his team are
on target with their pre-season development. His best time
of 2'01.190 was set on a qualifying tyre on his 23rd of 48
laps, putting him second in the standings behind team-mate
Jorge Lorenzo, who topped the time sheets today with an
impressive time of 2'00.705.
The Fiat Yamaha Team will reconvene
closer to home at Jerez in Spain on Saturday, 16th February
for the three-day Official MotoGP Test, the penultimate test
before the season kicks off in March.
Valentino
Rossi
"I'm really happy about
today's race simulation and about the overall balance of
this test. Everything has gone well and the race-simulation
was an improvement on the one from last time; this is the
real test of where we are. We've worked on various different
items in many different areas but we've had positive
feedback throughout. It's given me the chance to better
understand the tyres and today's simulation has given me
even more information about how they behave. We've worked
more at this test on the set-up of the bike to enable it to
work as well as possible with the new tyres and we've also
continued to work on the new engine, which will be the
standard one for this season, and on the electronics. We've
still got a lot to do but so far everything is progressing
well. Now we're looking forward to Jerez and seeing where we
are at a new track alongside all of our competitors."
Davide Brivio (Team
Manager)
"This test has been very positive; all the hard work that
the Yamaha engineers have put in over the winter is now
showing in our good results so I would like to say a big
thank you to all of them. We've seen improvement in all the
different areas in which we've worked in this week and so we
hope that these results will help us to create a competitive
package. Today's race simulation was good and an improvement
on January, plus the individual lap times within it were
fast and consistent. This is a very important indication of
our level. We've only done 50% of our pre-season testing, we
have two more to go before the first race but we hope to
continue improving like this and arrive at the first race in
good shape and ready to commence our challenge."
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