Red flag fall, Pedrosa 'understands things more clearly'

Dani Pedrosa's second day of official MotoGP testing at Phillip Island was interrupted by an accident at turn four, which brought out the red flags.

Fortunately the Spaniard was unharmed, although the incident did force a switch to his spare RC213V. The red flags would return at the end of the day when Yonny Hernandez fell at the same corner.

"I was doing good lap times in that run, improving my best time, then I tried braking a little too deep," Pedrosa explained. "I went in with too much speed and too much front brake, the tyre won't take it and I crashed.

"Fortunately I'm ok, unfortunately I had to change to the other bike with another setting. Then basically I did a tyre test but today my main focus was the chassis and engine, not on the electronics.

"I was working to get the best out of the new combination, understanding the behaviour of the new engine and chassis together so we can have a better base set-up for the rest of the tracks. We are working on the weight distribution and things like this.

"We don't yet have a clear setting, but we found some tendencies and this is positive for the technicians to change some parts on the bike and make new parts to have better behaviour in the future."

Pedrosa finished the day - the midway point in the 2016 pre-season test schedule - eighth on the timesheets, 0.786s behind compatriot Maverick Vinales (Suzuki).

The 28-time MotoGP race winner confirmed he is still using last year's chassis and, with much of HRC's focus still on the electronic and engine changes, isn't sure if chassis updates will be made by round one.

Honda's testing progress has been hampered by issues adapting to the new unified ECU software, but Pedrosa feels they are finally nearing the stage where they can plan the development "path".

"In Sepang we were confused. We couldn't understand well what was happening. Here today we did some learning and understand things a bit more clearly now. We still need to work, to think, study, confirm. But how much time it will take to [go down] the path to come, I don't know."

Pedrosa's team-mate Marc Marquez was second quickest with LCR's Cal Crutchlow in fifth. Testing concludes on Friday.