MOTORCYCLE INSURANCE NEWS - from the bike insurance specialist

Friday 1st February 2008

World champion Casey Stoner yesterday completed 29 laps in 1:30 secs at Phillip Island whilst experimenting with suspension set-up and tyres. The Australian (still recovering from an injured shoulder at Jerez in November), completed 73 laps and his team mate Marco Melandri completed just under a 100 laps making last miunute adjustments to their GP8 bikes.

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The sunshine dried the track in the afternoon and the test continued with Stoner in great form, the World Champion breaking the 1'30 mark on race tyres - some four tenths inside the circuit record set in 2005 by a 990cc machine - despite the cold and imperfect track conditions. Melandri was able to resume work on his set-up, concentrating principally on weight distribution as he continues his adaptation to the GP8.

Casey Stoner:

"Everything went really well today, the feeling with the bike was perfect almost straight away. The new Bridgestones, which had already given us positive feedback at Sepang, also worked perfectly here at Phillip Island - one of them in particular improves the bike a lot in the exit of the corners, especially in the final section of the track."

"We've also taken a step forward with some small changes to the front, which have made the bike more stable and improved grip to the point where my best time came without pushing, on a tyre that already had 17 laps on it. I'm also really happy with the latest specs of the engine and the way it is responding under acceleration coming out of the corners. The weather was basically perfect all day apart from when the wind picked up a little in the afternoon but the smaller fairing, which we used for the race here in October, meant that it wasn't a problem."

"Towards the end of the day my shoulder was a little sore because this is such a physical track, with a lot of fast corners, but it is still better than it was in Malaysia."

Marco Melandri:

"I'm really happy today because I finally feel as though I'm riding the bike more or less as I should. We knew that Phillip Island would be better for us and that's proved to be the case. The feeling was good from the first lap, thanks also to the things we learnt in the last test."

"At Sepang I probably changed the balance of the bike too much, trying to make it more similar to what I have ridden in the past, whereas here we've just tried to find a good base set-up, which has made it more manageable in the corners and less nervous. I am happy even though we're still not at 100%. We've actually got plans to try something new with the weight distribution tomorrow and we want to continue working on the electronics to try and improve the power delivery even more, then we can start tyre testing. In any case we've made a great start here."

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