By Peter McLaren
Hopkins, eighth on day one, used a late lap to edge out former team-mate
Chris Vermeulen by 0.144secs - with a time that was also 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.
