Spurred on by his progress, the former Honda Gresini rider Marco Melandri rode for almost 100 laps on his way to a competitive sixth position on the timesheets - 0.7secs behind team-mate, world champion and day one race-tyre leader Casey Stoner.

"I'm really happy today because I finally feel as though I'm riding the bike more or less as I should," confirmed the Italian. "We knew that Phillip Island would be better for us and that's proved to be the case. The feeling was good from the first lap, thanks also to the things we learnt in the last test.

"At Sepang I probably changed the balance of the bike too much, trying to make it more similar to what I have ridden in the past, whereas here we've just tried to find a good base set-up, which has made it more manageable in the corners and less nervous.

"I am happy even though we're still not at 100%. We've actually got plans to try something new with the weight distribution tomorrow and we want to continue working on the electronics to try and improve the power delivery even more, then we can start tyre testing.

"In any case we've made a great start here," he concluded.