MotoGP
Chinese GP: Konica Minolta Honda Friday notes
Konica Minolta Honda completes first practice in China Konica Minolta Honda struggled to find a perfect set-up to their Honda RC212V MotoGP machine in today's practice session for Sunday's Chinese Grand Prix. Shinya Nakano and his Team ...
Edited: May 5, 2007, 3:31 AM
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Konica Minolta Honda completes first practice in China
Konica Minolta Honda struggled to find a perfect set-up to their Honda RC212V MotoGP machine in today's practice session for Sunday's Chinese Grand Prix. Shinya Nakano and his Team tried a number of different settings but couldn't find a setting that suited him in the morning practice session. Reverting to a previous combination in the afternoon was an improvement, but then time was against them to improve further. Shinya and the Team are confident of an improvement during qualifying tomorrow for Sunday's 22-lap race.
Gianluca Montiron - Team Manager Konica Minolta Honda
"We started with two different settings on the bikes in a bid to find a solution for Shinya to have the performance from the machine that he needs and basically we spent both practice sessions trying to find a base set-up. Perhaps we made too many changes on both bikes, as Shinya needs clear feedback from the machine before he can push 100% so it's important for us to have clear vision about the direction we take with the machine now. Tonight we will analyse the data with the support of HRC and decide which direction we will move in tomorrow. The weather forecast isn't good tomorrow, but if it rains and we don't get any dry track time it will be even harder to find our optimum dry set-up. We have to be positive and I trust in the skill and dedication of the Team, so whatever happens I'm confident we can improve our performance in final qualifying."
Shinya Nakano - Rider, Konica Minolta Honda (40 laps - 2' 02.977")
"We tried hard to find a new setting this morning but it was not a good way to go and I didn't have a good feeling from the front tyre.In the afternoon we went back to a previous setting and it was an improvement, but thanks to the time we lost in the morning we couldn't improve things from there. Perhaps we changed too many things today, but now I know the track and I know we can improve in qualifying. We have two hours tomorrow and a warm-up session on Sunday before the race and it's the race that matters. Tomorrow we're going to put maximum effort in so we can improve our position."
Giulio Bernardelle - Technical Director, Konica Minolta Honda
"We set up our machine with completely different settings from before but we've not seen any good result at the end of the day and Shinya prefers the standard setting on the bike which we used in Istanbul. Tomorrow we will change the front geometry of the RC212V as Shinya says that the bike doesn't turn how he likes in the first part of the corner and he loses speed and the best line through the turns. It's going to be difficult to make all the changes and analyse them, as time is precious in tomorrow's two sessions. Today we also used a new front tyre with a new construction made by Michelin, but that didn't help us with the settings we used today. With the very long straight we could see that we were not so good on acceleration so we've altered the gearing to improve that, but this also makes the bike harder to ride for Shinya in certain parts of the track."
-credit: kmh
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