MotoGP
Italian GP: Konica Minolta race notes
Konica Minolta Honda Team takes vital home points at Mugello After a weekend of variable weather, today's Italian MotoGP race was held in glorious sunshine at the 3.2mile Mugello circuit. KONICA MINOLTA Honda's Shinya Nakano battled hard ...
Published: Jun 3, 2007, 10:46 PM
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Konica Minolta Honda Team takes vital home points at Mugello
After a weekend of variable weather, today's Italian MotoGP race was held in glorious sunshine at the 3.2mile Mugello circuit. KONICA MINOLTA Honda's Shinya Nakano battled hard in the early stages, but again suffered with chatter problems on his Honda RC212V machine eventually coming home in 13th position. The KONICA MINOLTA Honda Team will now analyse the data and make improvements to their Honda machine as the MotoGP paddock heads to Catalunya, near Barcelona for race seven of the 18-round championship, which takes place in just a week's time.
Gianluca Montiron - Team Manager Konica Minolta Honda
"I think the race was not so bad in the first part as Shinya was very close to the top lap time with his own. Then from the middle of the race onwards his times were not so consistent and the chatter from the front- end of his machine became a factor and this didn't allow Shinya to be consistent towards the end of the race. We now need to analyse this problem that Shinya had in the last part of race when the tyre is past its best. Thanks to a better performance at the start where his lap time was closer to the top group, we hope to have more data to analyse to find where the chatter is coming from. We will check with Michelin if other riders had this problem or if it is something only we suffer from. We will do this on the run-up to next week's Catalunya GP."
Shinya Nakano - Rider, Konica Minolta Honda (13th position)
"My start wasn't too bad and from then until the middle of race my lap time was pretty good and I had a good feeling with the bike. I felt that the race setting we had on the bike was the best of the weekend, but then from the middle of the race we suffered from a chatter problem once more and I had to reduce my corner speed, which is when Colin Edwards overtook me. From there I was on my own with a gap behind me, so even though I couldn't push any harder, I wanted to hang on for some points. We will now look at the data and hopefully improve in time for next week's race."
Giulio Bernardelle - Technical Director, Konica Minolta Honda
"In the early laps we could see that Shinya could run similar lap times to the group in front of him, but from the middle of the race we again could see that the bike was chattering and under-steering and the problem got worse so it was not possible for him to push any harder. His early performance meant that we were looking at a top 10 finish and our potential at this race was probably higher than in the last couple of races. Obviously we are disappointed with this situation and tonight we will be analysing the data to see why. Warm-up this morning was dry, but the temperature was low so it was not so easy to choose our race tyre. We had two choices and went with the harder of the two, so we will also be talking to our Technical Partner Michelin to make improvements in time for Barcelona."
-credit: kmh
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