bigbadbrother
03-01-2014, 08:46 PM
Nicky Hayden and Hiroshi Aoyama posted their best times of the second Sepang test on final day of the Malaysian visit.
The DRIVE M7 Aspar teammates both picked up their pace on the final day, the Japanese rider clocking his best time of the entire six days in February at Sepang (2:02.070), although the American was unable to match his fastest effort from the first visit, when the conditions were more favorable.
Despite the tortuous heat, both riders managed to improve the consistency of their lap times and are looking forward to making more progress in the next test.
“We still don’t know why we’re struggling so much to get the bike stopped into the corners so we need to work more with the electronics,” Hayden said. “It has been a strange day and we lost some time making alterations to the setup to adapt to the heat. We know our potential is much higher than we have been able to show here, so we can be optimistic and go to Qatar next week ready to put some more hard work in.”
Aoyama added, “We had a little setback today and had to put everything on hold at around midday but in the end we fixed it and got back out on track. Our objective today was to continue working on the setup, and we managed to improve the feeling by the end of the day. As well as improving the feeling, we also improved the lap times, but we still have plenty to test next week in Qatar. We need to have a meeting and work out how we can improve the suspension but, in general, the feeling is that the bike is good and has plenty of room for improvement — it just needs more laps.”
The DRIVE M7 Aspar teammates both picked up their pace on the final day, the Japanese rider clocking his best time of the entire six days in February at Sepang (2:02.070), although the American was unable to match his fastest effort from the first visit, when the conditions were more favorable.
Despite the tortuous heat, both riders managed to improve the consistency of their lap times and are looking forward to making more progress in the next test.
“We still don’t know why we’re struggling so much to get the bike stopped into the corners so we need to work more with the electronics,” Hayden said. “It has been a strange day and we lost some time making alterations to the setup to adapt to the heat. We know our potential is much higher than we have been able to show here, so we can be optimistic and go to Qatar next week ready to put some more hard work in.”
Aoyama added, “We had a little setback today and had to put everything on hold at around midday but in the end we fixed it and got back out on track. Our objective today was to continue working on the setup, and we managed to improve the feeling by the end of the day. As well as improving the feeling, we also improved the lap times, but we still have plenty to test next week in Qatar. We need to have a meeting and work out how we can improve the suspension but, in general, the feeling is that the bike is good and has plenty of room for improvement — it just needs more laps.”