Steady progress for KONICA MINOLTA Honda at final GP of
2007
Shinya Nakano and the KONICA MINOLTA Honda Team made steady
progress during the first practice session for this weekend’s
final MotoGP race of the year. Shinya and the Team were struggling
a little with the lower than expected temperatures at the
2.764-mile circuit. The Team altered the weight balance of
their Honda RC212V machine to try and give 30-year-old Nakano
more feeling from the front-end of the bike in Valencia’s
challenging tight turns. Tomorrow it is expected that temperatures
will be higher – more like the normal conditions at
the Ricardo Tormo circuit for the time of year – which
should lead to more grip from the circuit and improved laptimes.
Once more the times were close amongst the MotoGP riders with
just one second covering the top 13 riders.
Gianluca Montiron – Team Manager KONICA MINOLTA
Honda
“I think it’s clear today that we have to find
the perfect set-up for Shinya, as at the moment he is not
able to ride the bike in a comfortable way. We also have a
little bit of chattering and also need to finalise our tyre
choice for the race. I expect that we will make a big improvement
tomorrow, as I know that Shinya with qualifying tyres will
be much faster than today with a race tyres! We can see once
more that Valencia is a circuit that promotes close racing
as the gap between each rider today was very small.”
Shinya Nakano – Rider, KONICA MINOLTA Honda
(56 laps – 1’ 34.352”)
“Yet again we’ve had some low temperatures during
the first day of practice, although this afternoon conditions
were a little better. We tried four different tyres today
– one or two were not so bad even if overall our position
is not so good in 16th. That shows just how close it is again.
The positive point is that I didn’t have any big problems
today. I tried to follow some of the other guys and see where
I was losing time and I could see it was on the exit of the
turns. Tomorrow we will make some alterations to improve our
rear-end grip as this is important at such a technical track
where you need to get out of the turns well to get into the
next corner. I enjoy this place, I look back and have some
good memories from Valencia – especially in the 250
class – so tomorrow I want to be much higher up.”
Giulio Bernardelle – Technical Director, KONICA
MINOLTA Honda
“So we start our last Grand Prix of 2007. Basically
today it was quite a similar situation to the last two or
three MotoGP races, where we have found the temperatures quite
low – much lower than normal here in Valencia for this
time of year. Today the temperature on the ground was just
14 degrees. I think this has led us to suffer a little from
a lack of grip and particularly the front feeling of the machine,
which Shinya says is not so good. Today we tested some tyres
and I think we understood which was the best direction to
move in. In the afternoon we changed a lot of settings, including
moving some weight to the front. This made the situation better,
even if the lap time didn’t improve so much. The important
point is that Shinya is feeling better with the bike now and
we’re expecting higher temperatures tomorrow.”
GP de la Comunitat Valenciana - Free practice classification
1) Casey Stoner Ducati 1’ 32.968”
2) Sylvain Guintoli Yamaha 1’ 33.084”
3) Dani Pedrosa Honda 1’ 33.150”
4) Marco Melandri Honda 1’ 33.319”
5) Chris Vermeulen Suzuki 1’ 33.501”
16) Shinya Nakano Honda 1’ 34.352”
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