MotoGP world champion
Nicky Hayden become the first rider to put a RC212V under 2min 3secs around Sepang during day two of the Malaysian test - but the bad news was that his best lap time was only good enough for eighth fastest.
Indeed, despite a 0.465secs improvement in lap time, Hayden - who had been fifth on day one - remained 1.14secs behind fastest man
John Hopkins, but now with two Suzukis, two Yamahas, two Ducatis and a Kawasaki ahead of him as Honda was left the 'slowest' of the five manufacturers.
However, while admitting that he and Honda are "still some way off where we need to be", Hayden claimed he was happy with his Tuesday progress.
"We actually learned quite a lot about how the new bike works today and we improved by almost half a second so it's nice to see some progress," he said. "We weren't testing new parts from HRC, just working with suspension, wheelbase, springs - general settings stuff to try and get the bike a little bit quicker. We definitely improved the bike and learned some more about how it works and reacts to different settings and conditions. We're still some way off where we need to be though so we've got to keep our heads down and keep working really hard."
Team-mate
Dani Pedrosa was next to Hayden on the end of day timesheets, having suffered a slow speed fall on his way to ninth out of the 20 riders present.
"Today we worked hard on many different ways to improve the bike. With testing there are always some things that work and some that don't work so it was a useful day even though we didn't set a very fast laptime," stated the Spaniard. "Unfortunately I made a small mistake on the brakes into the slow left-hander at turn nine - I was a little off-line and lost the front, but it wasn't a big crash, just a human mistake. Tomorrow we will try to go a little quicker and we'll also be working with Michelin on some tyre testing."
Of the other Honda riders,
Marco Melandri (Gresini) was 11th,
Shinya Nakano (Konica) 12th, Carlos Checa (LCR) 13th,
Kenny Roberts (Team Roberts) 15th and
Toni Elias (Gresini) 17th.
