Satisfactory Estoril result pleases Puig

A third podium in 2008 for Dani Pedrosa at the third round of the season was enough to keep him in the lead in the World Championship, albeit now jointly with Estoril race winner Jorge Lorenzo, and the result satisfied the young Catalan rider´s manager and mentor Alberto Puig.

Last year´s MotoGP runner-up has now been on the podium for five consecutive races - including the last two rounds of 2007 - and his Portuguese performance adds to his third in Qatar and his win at Jerez to give him a points haul of 61, the same total achieved by his premier class rookie compatriot Lorenzo and 14 more than third placed Valentino Rossi in the general classification.

Starting from second on the grid at the bwin.com Grande Premio de Portugal Pedrosa was always in contention for victory as he skillfully battled with the strong Fiat Yamaha pair of Lorenzo and Rossi but he eventually had to settle for second place.

Looking back on another solid display, Puig commented, `It was not so bad. It was a difficult race because at the beginning there were some rain spots and we were a little bit scared, but fortunately nothing happened and it was ok. We fought hard.´

`There were some little points where we were not so fast and in the end we couldn´t make it (to win), but second place is good enough for us here and now we will go to China with good hopes.´

On the overall strength of the Michelin-Honda RC212V package at round three Puig concluded, `I think the tyres were ok but there were some very little things on the bike that we missed and they can finally make the difference, but we cannot blame that and you cannot expect to win every weekend so we will arrive at the next round with a good mentality.´

Having topped the timesheet in Monday´s post-GP test Pedrosa himself added, `It´s been another positive day of testing. We focused mostly on testing tyres with Michelin, both race tyres and qualifying tyres, because I needed to improve my performance on qualifiers. The day´s work has helped us prepare for the Chinese GP and further improve our base setup.´

`We also did some work on the chassis and suspension to improve front-end feeling during hard braking, because this aspect of performance is particularly important at Shanghai, and we also worked on the electronics.´