Sepang 1 Test Summary – Day 2: A Tale of the Tape?

The first day of the first Sepang MotoGP test is always a revealing of secrets. It’s not that the factories tell the media everything they are doing, but with everyone on the track, there is nowhere left to hide. The timesheets tell the tale.

The story of the second day is always a little more complex. Initial impressions from the first day are absorbed, the data examined and analyzed, and engineers and mechanics come up with new ideas.

That means that riders are working on different ideas and in different directions, some changes work, others don’t. Times become much more difficult to assess.

So what did we learn today? A lot. Not so much from the lap times – Jorge Lorenzo is fastest, and looking as good as ever, Andrea Dovizioso is incredibly quick, especially on a new soft tire, and the Hondas have chosen a direction to follow – but more about the underlying state of play.

It was a fascinating day, despite the fact that the standing barely changed much after noon.

I went out and stood at track side for an hour, intending to walk all around the circuit using the service road. That proved to be optimistic – despite the fact that it is cooler here than it was last year, the heat quickly becomes brutal.

I made it half way round, and given a visceral sense of how punishing riding a MotoGP bike at speed must be. It is really, really tough.

My impressions from watching confirmed some of the things the time sheets showed: the Yamahas are in fantastic shape, both Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi are a joy to watch.

Jack Miller has a lot to learn – as his harmless low side crash in the morning showed – the Australian looking very ragged and trying to force the bike to do things it doesn’t want to do.

Cal Crutchlow looks better every time he goes out, though he continues to describe the bike as ‘difficult to ride’. He is not alone in that, Scott Redding said exactly the same thing (but more of that later).

You could see Redding learning lap by lap: on his out lap, he looked uncomfortable, and stiff on the bike, but got better, and faster, each time he came round. By the time he went back into the pits, he looked like a different rider.

The Yamahas continue to be fast, with Jorge Lorenzo saying he felt he was faster than he was in 2013, when he won eight races. While Lorenzo was totally positive about the day, Valentino Rossi ran into chatter, suffering major vibration through the corners.

Changing tires helped a little, but did not solve the problem, so the work for the evening was to examine the data and check the clutch and the engine braking settings, in an attempt to fix the problem.

At Repsol Honda, Dani Pedrosa and Marc Márquez have settled on one bike out of the several they had to choose from. Whether both riders chose the same bike is unknown, it is not uncommon for HRC to run two slightly different configurations for each of their factory riders.

The description Pedrosa and Márquez gave suggests they are the same: they both praised the front end, but said the rear still needs work. The rear is still spinning too much, and not providing grip.

The problem may be down to the engine, which is extremely aggressive, which Marc Márquez said was more aggressive than last year’s bike. “Maybe too much,” he told us.

This was one of the things which makes the Honda such a difficult bike to ride. Honda always makes aggressive engines, was the consensus among those who should know, and this is just another example of their penchant for horsepower.

That much power needs chassis modifications to make it usable, an area in which Cal Crutchlow worked on on Thursday. The LCR team played around with different stiffnesses to help give Crutchlow some grip, the rear wanting to spin up all the time.

Crutchlow ended the day just over a second behind Jorge Lorenzo, and sandwiched between the two Monster Tech 3 Yamaha riders. Both Bradley Smith and Pol Espargaro had had a very busy day, being given a lot of parts to test at Sepang.

It was especially tough on Smith, the Englishman having sprained his ankle very badly while riding motocross. Smith was limping badly off the bike, and in pain on the bike, but persevered, and scored a respectable time given the circumstances.

At Ducati, Andrea Dovizioso is once again happy at both his pace on a soft tire and at his overall pace in race conditions.

Having put in 50 laps at a consistent pace was important, the only slight disappointment that he could not get into the 1’59s, falling just short with a lap of 2’00.015. He believed that if it doesn’t rain overnight, he should be able to do it.

Yesterday, Dovizioso had told us that the Ducati Desmosedici GP14.3 was almost identical to the GP14.2. His teammate Andrea Iannone let a little more of the cat out of the bag today, saying that the bike is different in both chassis and engine.

The chassis has been altered to allow a greater range of adjustment – something which Ducati did twice in 2014 – and that meant Iannone could run the setup he wanted. The engine is also different, though the layout and engine casings look identical.

The new engine was smoother, Iannone said, though Dovizioso downplayed this suggestion, saying the difference was marginal. Ducati have been toying with crankshaft weights, to smooth power delivery, and this was probably a further development of this.

Now that there are five factories in MotoGP, as well as some exciting satellite teams and interesting developments among the Open bikes, it has become impossible to get round to talk to all of the riders.

It makes it impossible to tell the stories of all of the riders. It becomes difficult to do justice to everything that happens in the paddock, and cover even the most essential information.

So I can only briefly mention subjects which deserve more: Maverick Viñales’ outstanding progress on the Suzuki, taking 1.2 seconds off his time from the first day, and getting into the top 15, just six tenths off his teammate.

Loris Baz’s solid progress, the most improved rider on the second day. The chatter plaguing the new Open Honda RC213V-RS, which both Nicky Hayden and Eugene Laverty are struggling with (though Hayden’s wrist is much better than it was last year).

Hector Barbera’s strong showing on the Avintia Ducati. There are not enough hours in the day, and I need to sleep sometimes. To see how well each rider did on the second day, see the timesheet below comparing improvement between best times.

But there is one more story to tell. Though on the face of it, Scott Redding’s lap times are disappointing, nearly 1.9 seconds off Marc Márquez on a bike which is just about identical. I had a long chat with his crew chief Chris Pike, a chat with team manager Michael Bartholemy, and a word with Redding himself.

They all said the same thing: the lap times don’t tell the whole story, Redding is working differently, with a view to being faster later this year, not at the test.

So remember, when you look for the name of your favorite rider on a results sheet during this test, their best lap is telling you far from the full story.

Rider improvement from Wednesday:

Source: MotoGP; Photo: Yamaha

This article was originally published on MotoMatters, and is republished here on Asphalt & Rubber with permission by the author.