KONICA MINOLTA Honda swelters at hot Japanese Grand Prix
The first practice sessions for this weekend’s Japanese
Grand Prix took place in sweltering weather conditions today.
Once more the lap times were extremely close with the top
15 riders being covered by just one second. Shinya Nakano
spent the day evaluating tyres and making suspension changes
to his KONICA MINOLTA Honda RCV212V, as he tried to find a
tyre and suspension combination that worked well around the
2.98mile Twin Ring Motegi circuit. After being in the top
ten during the morning session, the former All-Japan 250cc
champion slipped to 12th in the afternoon’s session,
but is confident of making improvements before tomorrow’s
qualifying session.
Gianluca Montiron – Team Manager KONICA MINOLTA
Honda
“Today I’m not completely satisfied as I think
Shinya could have made a bigger step forward this afternoon,
but with the new tyre regulations we must save our best tyre
for tomorrow. In the morning our situation was better as Shinya
was fast and consistent, but this afternoon as other people
made big improvements our improvement was not as large, but
Shinya was still able to make his best time towards the end.
We know we have to work hard to find a good setting for tomorrow
and we are sure that Shinya can make a good qualifying time,
we just also need to try and be consistent during the full
race distance, so we hope that any improvements we make will
help Shinya’s overall race rhythm.”
Shinya Nakano – Rider, KONICA MINOLTA Honda
(48 laps – 1’ 48.697”)
“It’s good to be home! Today was quite good in
the morning, although the afternoon session was even warmer
so this made it difficult to choose our tyres. Tyre choice
will be critical here and we may need to use a harder tyre
than we first thought. Today we chose two tyres that we will
use tomorrow and compare their performance. The nature of
Motegi means that both tyre and suspension settings are key
to a good lap time, so we will be working hard to find the
right combination. I’m confident for qualifying tomorrow,
although as we’ve seen today it’s going to be
very close indeed!”
Giulio Bernardelle – Technical Director, KONICA MINOLTA
Honda
“Things are fairly positive, as our situation is not
so different from Estoril because we’re not so far behind
the top runners. In fact, perhaps we’re closer as only
Dani Pedrosa was able to do a 1m47 lap. The main point we
have been working on today is our ability to be able to run
more consistently in the 48s, at the moment it’s not
so easy for Shinya to do those times, so we need to do some
more work on the bike to help achieve this. Today we can’t
be really fast in the last three corners, but if we can solve
this problem then it’s possible to cut 0.4s from our
lap time. To do this we will have to work on our suspension
settings, as there are lots of hard braking and hard accelerating
points from low speed, so Motegi works the suspension quite
hard. It’s very hot here today! Temperatures mean that
we will finalise tyre choice tomorrow at some point. Here
it seems that the morning temperatures aren’t too different
from the afternoon which helps with consistency, although
Sunday’s race may take place in cooler conditions.”
Japan GP - Free practice classification
1) Dani Pedrosa Honda 1’ 47.865”
2) Randy De Puniet Kawasaki 1’ 48.254”
3) Marco Melandri Honda 1’ 48.351”
4) John Hopkins Suzuki 1’ 48.361”
5) Casey Stoner Ducati 1’ 48.444”
12) Shinya Nakano Honda 1’ 48.697”
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