With Valentino Rossi side lined due to his broken hand sustained during his fall at Valencia, it was down to rookie Jorge Lorenzo to take over the test programme. This is the 20-year old Spaniard's second outing on the M1 since the end of the season as he now prepares to officially join the Yamaha team in January.

Due to heavy rain in the morning the youngster didn't get on track until 11am. He got his head down and completed 26 laps as he continued to learn about his new bike and tyres. The team had planned to continue its work in the afternoon but another heavy rainstorm meant the track did not dry out sufficiently again and the team abandoned testing for the day.

“It's a pity about the weather but overall the first day has been quite positive, even if I haven't been so fast,” said Lorenzo. “We managed to do 26 laps before lunch and then the rain came and we weren't able to do anymore, so hopefully it will be better tomorrow because we have a lot to do! All the time I'm feeling more natural on the bike and I can feel the difference from Valencia, but I need to make a few changes to my riding style in order to fully adapt and we're working on this.”

It is a steep learning curve moving up to MotoGP and Lorenzo admits he is still getting to grips with his new machine. “It's hard for me to use all the power at the moment and I need to learn to be slower and smoother in the corners and to open the throttle a bit earlier. I'm struggling a bit to find the fast lap times but this is normal because there is still so much about the bike that I don't understand. Tomorrow we have some new things to try, including a new fork, and I will just keep on working steadily.”

Lorenzo posted the ninth fastest time of the day with a lap of 2mins 04.433secs, with the unofficial time sheets topped by Randy de Puniet, in a time of 2mins 03.033secs.