By Peter McLaren

Despite finishing second in the 2007 world championship with Dani Pedrosa, Honda is gambling on an all-new RC212V to try and regain the MotoGP crown - but at present it's slower than last year's bike.

The safe option would have been to tweak the 2007 machine but, with only two wins last season, Honda felt that a bold engineering step was needed to provide a performance leap.

So, despite gaining significant ground on Casey Stoner and Ducati during this season, and winning the Valencian season finale, HRC has unveiled a radically redesigned 2008 RC212V - featuring a new engine, with pneumatic valve springs, plus a new chassis and exhaust system.

"From the start of this year, one project team got on with developing this year's bike and another project team got on with the new [2008] bike," HRC sporting director Chris Herring told Crash.net. "Obviously the [2008] project team watched what was going on with the '07 and learnt lessons, but the new bike is completely different. It's very, very early days."

Such a big step means starting almost from scratch, since little of the 2007 data can be transferred directly across and, as such, the performance of the new bike is currently well below that of the old.

"I'd say the '08 is about one second off [the '07]... at least," Nicky Hayden told Crash.net after the final day of testing at Sepang, where he said goodbye to the '07 bike with a record-shattering qualifying-tyre lap.

The 2008's biggest performance limiter at present is its engine, which - despite the new valve system - is down on power and has a harsh delivery. That not only limits the lap time but is delaying chassis development.

"Right now the engine is quite a way down and it's really hard to tell what the chassis is going to be able to do until we get more power in it, because then it's going to react differently," explained Hayden. "At the moment the power is not smooth and overall is just really slow.

"It's still too early [to judge the impact of the pneumatic valves], we'll have to see in the future," added the 2006 world champion. "We've got a lot of work to do with the '08, but we're going about it in the right way. We've got a base that's not too bad."