Pedrosa, whose first also moved him into the early world championship lead, didn't use a qualifying tyre and set a best lap time of 1min 40.116secs on race rubber - exactly matching his new race lap record set during in the grand prix!
"Today we worked on basic setup to help us get more familiar with the bike, to know our package better and to find the best direction so we can continue improving. It's the kind of work we usually do at pre-season tests but we weren't able to do this year because of my injury," confirmed the young Spaniard
"It was a necessary job with a lot of stops in the pits but I think it was very useful. We also started working on tyres with Michelin and we will focus on tyre testing all day tomorrow. It will be a very important day, crucial for our development programme," he revealed.
Team-mate
Nicky Hayden, fourth on Sunday during his first race with the new RCV chassis, also rode exclusively with race tyres on Monday and finished the day 0.273secs slower than Pedrosa.
"We learned some stuff today, we were able to run pretty decent and consistent laps using reference tyres and we got some good data, so quite a positive day all in all," stated the American. "We had nothing major to test, just some different clutch options to get into the corners a little bit better and some general setup options, looking for a bit of edge traction to help save the tyre over race distance. We'll come back again tomorrow, get another full day and just work our way through some more options."
