European testing phase concludes at Jerez
The sun finally burst through in the early afternoon of Team
San Carlo Honda Gresini’s final day of tests at Jerez,
providing improving track conditions towards the end of the
day. This allowed the team to continue set-up work on their
Honda RC212V machines and complete more development work together
with Bridgestone ahead of the opening Grand Prix of the season.
Both Shinya and Alex were able to take advantage of the ideal
conditions and gather lots of useful data.
Alex de Angelis (56 laps, 1.39.932): “It
has been a positive day – I never expected a lap time
like that. We’ve worked a lot with Bridgestone and the
results are there to see. We’ve put a decent race pace
together and I think we can go to Qatar with smiles on our
faces, confident that we can be competitive from the start
of the season. We still have work to do to improve though,
especially on a qualifying tyre.”
Shinya Nakano (56 laps, 1.40.33): “Today
we worked really hard on eliminating the front-end chatter
and we did manage to improve it although it is not perfect
yet. Towards the end of the day the balance and the setting
of the bike were better and I was able to test some different
qualifying tyres. I know that I can improve even more and
that’s the objective for the next test, to make sure
I’m ready for the first Grand Prix.”
Fausto Gresini – Team Manager: “We’ve
gathered a lot of information over these last three days of
tests and I’m satisfied with the work ethic from the
riders and the whole team. For the first time we’ve
had fully updated bikes from Honda and we’ve worked
hard to set them up with the first Grand Prix of the season
in mind. We’ve still got one more test in Qatar, which
for us will be very important, to define some of the details
of the package available to us at this point. But it has definitely
been a positive test.”
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