By Peter McLaren

Hopkins, eighth on day one, used a late lap to edge out former team-mate Chris Vermeulen by 0.144secs at the conclusion of the second day in Malaysia, with day one leader Randy de Puniet demoted to a still impressive third for Honda LCR.

Testing was delayed by morning rain, but the track was sufficiently dry by midday and testing then continued non-stop until 6pm.

Hopkins' lap time was inside the best set by a Kawasaki or Suzuki rider during last month's Malaysian Grand Prix, and just a tenth shy of Casey Stoner's lap record. Off track, the #21 also shed some light on Kawasaki's plans for 2008 - and revealed that there will be no 'new' machine.

Instead, Team Green is opting for a process of continual development to the respected 2007 model - which scored a best finish of second - with a constant flow of new parts due to appear between now and the Qatar season opener on March 9.

"The way that we're managing it is that we're going to start with the '07 bike - we're not bringing out a completely new '08 bike," Hopkins told Crash.net. "What we're doing is to keep improving on what we have now and get new parts throughout the winter. So we'll always have new parts to test, but there won't be a completely different bike [launched next year] or anything like that."

And that process of continual improvement has already begun.

"The parts that I've received so far were completely new," Hopper revealed. "I asked for some new clutch parts and similar things after riding the bike for the first time at Valencia, just to help get into the corners better and smoothen everything up a little. Those new parts were here [at Sepang] and were exactly what I wanted, which is amazing in such a short amount of time."

Hopkins had been a Suzuki grand prix rider for five years, having joined the factory team in 2003 - the second year in MotoGP for both the Anglo-American and the GSV-R. Kawasaki's grand prix machine, like the GSV-R, uses Bridgestone tyres, but Hopkins says they have little else in common.

"The bikes are definitely night and day different, from Suzuki to Kawasaki," he declared. "There are some negatives and some positives with the Kawasaki, but by the end of testing I'm quite confident that we'll turn the negatives into positives.

"The Kawasaki engine is definitely very fast," he continued. "The ultimate goal is to make the power manageable. Right now we're getting a lot of wheelies and - coming out of the corners - the traction control system does work very, very well, but there are a lot of places where we can make the power more manageable."