The Fiat Yamaha star, whose world title hopes are now all but over after slipping 85 points behind
Casey Stoner, spent most of the day testing tyres for Michelin - including some promising new material - but was also able to shed more light on the cause of his miserable exit from Sunday's race.
"The disappointment of yesterday hasn't gone away but of course the best way to deal with it has been to get back to work, and this is what we've done today," began Rossi, who had been using the new Yamaha engine, featuring pneumatic valves, for the first time in a race. "Our engineers have looked at the engine and it seems that the problem was something which could have occurred also in the old one, so it was just bad luck for us. The new engine gives us some speed advantage over the old one so we will keep on working on its development."
Rossi went on to set the fourth fastest test time, just 0.24secs behind pace setter Stoner, who won his eighth race of the season on Sunday.
"This afternoon we tried some new tyres and we found some very interesting and positive things. It seems that Michelin have done a good job in their recent work and it was definitely a much more positive test than in Brno, so we're quite happy with our day's work," confirmed Rossi.
Team-mate
Colin Edwards was just 0.1secs slower and underlined the progress made by Michelin.
"This morning we were working on the right side of the tyre following the problems we had yesterday and to be honest we didn't really make much progress. However after lunch Michelin brought out some new stuff which I tried and immediately liked and so we just kept working in that direction throughout the afternoon," said the Texan, just ninth in the grand prix. "I was doing mid 34s very comfortably and it really felt better and better as we went on, so I was really pleased.
