2018 season gets underway for the Repsol Honda Team, with the first of two days of testing completed in Valencia

“Today was a typical test day, when you need to work and be patient in the garage because everything is new. The most important thing was to understand the direction to take with the new bike, not to be the fastest rider. Of course in the morning I was fast and constant with my current bike, but then in the afternoon we moved on to the new machine, which obviously has many new things to work on to set it up. Tomorrow we’ll have the chance to collect much more data, as today I was only able to complete three runs on the 2018 bike. It has a different chassis, a different engine and other different details to set up, so now it’s important to try and understand the strong points and those that need to be improved, and then to make the best compromise.”

“Today we made a few runs on the 2017 bike in the morning to understand the track, which was quite dirty in the beginning, then we focused on the new bike, beginning work on the setup. We used our standard setting, and of course because the chassis and engine are new, all the data have to be adjusted. We have to work a lot on that, which takes time. We didn’t change too many things, because we must proceed step by step. That’s quite normal, and it's also normal that there are currently both positive aspects and others where we need to improve, but in general it was a productive day of testing.”