Rossi: “We’re already very fast”

Valentino Rossi was the fastest rider on Thursday– as he was three weeks earlier at the Sepang International Circuit - as the first day of the second test of 2010 ended, and the reigning World Champion was extremely satisfied with how his prototype is working.

Trying out different settings and some new electronic maps Rossi’s best lap of 2'01.068 was 0.151s faster than closest rival Casey Stoner, and on Friday he will continue his work in an attempt to further improve on what he has already accomplished.

“We started well today and we're already very fast, so we're quite happy about this. We've confirmed that the work we did at the last test was good and it's clear we're in good shape at this track,” said the 31 year-old, who rode 47 laps.

“We worked on two or three different settings and today we've more or less made a decision about the right way to go with balance, suspension etc so this is good progress. We also tried some new electronic maps to try to improve acceleration, but we need to do more work on this again tomorrow. It's good to be fast at this stage and now we're really just waiting to go to another track, to see how this new M1 will perform there.”

The aim for Friday will be to accumulate more laps, and Rossi added: “Tomorrow we will do a long run, maybe not race distance but just quite a few laps together, which will be the final part of our work at this track.”

Rossi’s Fiat Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo is not testing at Sepang as he continues to recover from the hand injury he suffered in a training accident two weeks ago.