Troy Corser declared himself happy with the three day Pirelli tyre test in Qatar after posting the second fastest time onboard his Yamaha Motor Italia R1.

The Australian posted a best time of 1min 58.9secs during the test, leaving him seventh tenths of a second off the quickest lap from countyman Troy Bayliss on the Ducati.

For Corser, the Qatar test marked his final on track appearance of 2006 and he admitted he was looking forward to the next session – which will take place on home soil at Phillip Island in the New Year.

“I am very happy how these tests in Qatar have gone and am happy with my R1 Yamaha,” he said. “Generally everything went pretty well and I already have a good feeling with the bike. We didn't quite get through everything we wanted to do, but we almost did - and that was good. We found some positive things and we will carry on working on them at the next tests.

"I didn't find it at all hard to do the lap times and I wasn't even pushing hard! When we made small changes to the chassis, I could feel it straightaway and knew what was going on. We tried some different swinging-arms, but left links to later - when we get round to the fine-tuning of the chassis.

"I can't tell you how comfortable the bike feels - it feels like I've been riding it for a while, not just a couple of times. The riding style is very different and for me the bike feels like a real racebike - and I like that! We tried some changes to the engine - mechanical and electronic - to smooth out the power delivery and found some good solutions, so that's another positive.

"In the next tests, we'll basically try and verify our chassis settings and see how the bike works again. That will be at Phillip Island, which is a much better testing track then Qatar. I've always said that if you can get a bike to work well at Phillip Island, it's going to work pretty good at almost every other track in the world. It's also one of my favourite tracks, so I'm hoping to really enjoy myself there.”