MotoGP news

Hopkins getting comfortable on his Ninja ZX-RR

Kawasaki's John Hopkins continued to improve his lap time during the second day of testing at a blisteringly hot Sepang circuit. The Anglo-American was just over half-a-second off the fastest time today, but is confidently predicting that this gap will be much reduced once he gets the chance tomorrow to dial in further the set-up of his Ninja ZX-RR.

Hopkins focussed mainly on evaluating rear tyres that may prove suitable for use at the first race in Qatar, which is likely to be run under similar conditions as experienced today in Sepang. The 24-year-old Kawasaki rider ended the test confident that the tyre data acquired today would allow Bridgestone to identify the best combination of construction, profile and compound for the unique demands of the Qatar circuit.

Hopkins commented on his second day at Sepang: "We started out this morning by running through some tyres that Bridgestone have brought here, basically to try and identify what will work for the first race of the season in Qatar. It was a useful test, I felt pretty comfortable on the bike and I think it will stand us in good stead come Qatar.

"We've also continued the evaluation of the two chassis options we have here, and at the moment we've gone with the one closest to the 2007 spec. The other chassis option has some positive points, but we need to do some more work on a few areas before we go with it on the race bike. The engineers will now take this chassis back to Japan, together with the data on it that we've collected, and I guess we will be testing further revisions pretty soon. Tomorrow I'll do a long distance run, and then we'll be looking to refine the set-up of the bike to suit my personal preferences, which I'm looking forward to."

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