The results sheet showed one thing all too clearly: the Hondas are on a different planet, Dani Pedrosa being a tenth faster than his teammate Casey Stoner, but the gap back to Ben Spies in 3rd is enormous. Spies was over a second slower than Pedrosa, and nine tenths off Stoner, and at the head of a group of eight riders separated by just over a second. When I asked one Honda insider about the Honda tests in Jerez at the start of the year, they used the word "insane" to describe the performance. At Valencia, we got a taste of what that meant.


The irony was that at the end of the day, I spoke to HRC Vice President Shuhei Nakamoto, and he spoke of his concern at the situation of Suzuki, and Honda's need to have competition, and someone to measure themselves against. On the evidence of the first day of testing, they won't be finding it in MotoGP. Casey Stoner complained of chatter from the new softer compound Bridgestone tires, and said he did not expect this to be Honda's 2012 bike, with more work needed on stability in corner entry and engine braking. Fastest man of the day - by a whole second over the first non-Honda, may I remind you - Dani Pedrosa said that he still hadn't figured out how to ride the new bike, had learned a lot and was still piecing everything together. If they are a second faster than the rest now, Zeus only knows how much quicker they will be once they get everything sorted out.

Rossi looks like Rossi again, not like somebody stole his leathers as he did at Valencia last year. The new frame is an improvement.

...stunning pieces of engineering, and beautiful to look at.....level of aural richness that has been missing from MotoGP over the last few years....

Valentino Rossi:
“These were two important days of testing because we needed to collect a lot of data for the next few months of work, which will be crucial. The positives of this bike are certainly the engine, which I like, and the fact that it handles a bit better than the previous one. It’s definitely more fun, in part because you can get sideways more. The frame isn’t bad, but it needs work. We have to improve the braking, because I need to brake harder and later, and we need to improve traction under acceleration. Filippo has many ideas, and now we have a little time to apply them before next year’s tests.”

Filippo Preziosi
"...... carry out a series of comparisons between different solutions, as there are still chassis parameters that we have to define for the project we’re working on. It has been really hard work, but we’ve collected a lot of information that we’ll now use for the design that we’ll be doing in the coming weeks."