Karel Abraham finished the first on-track MotoGP action of the year in twelfth position. The Czech motorcycle rider ended the final day of the official MotoGP Test at Sepang in Malaysia by setting his fastest lap time of 2:02,218. Compared to his yesterday’s maximum, Karel Abraham improved his time by 380 thousandths, but finished 2,611 seconds behind the leader. The fastest rider Casey Stoner set the fastest lap of the day with 1:59,607 on his second lap and finished almost six tenths ahead of second Jorge Lorenzo.
Karel Abraham
„Today’s test didn’t go very well. We made some improvements in the morning, but then we had the same problems as always. The bike slided a lot and I wasn’t able to accelerate from the corner enough. We figured out something right before the end and my feeling on the bike was much more better. We were able to post fast and stable lap times, but then the rain came and it was over. It looks like an optimistic end, but I’m not sure if the bike will work just as well as today during the next test. Sometimes in the past we thought we have a good set-up that didn’t work next time.“
Martin Havlíček, mechanic of Cardion AB Motoracing team
„Although we set our best lap time of the day during the morning session, we produced our best result right before the end when we made some changes on the set-up of the bike and Karel completed a few fast laps in a row. That’s a good news for us, but we’re still quite disappointed with today’s result. We compared our lap times from every part of the track and we know that we could post lap time around 2:01,500, but unfortunately we weren’t able to put these fastest parts together into a single lap. Gap between us and the fastest rider is bigger than yesterday, but it’s the same for every rider. We must admit that Casey Stoner produces phenomenal lap times.
This test was tough start of the season for us. We suffered from the fact that we weren’t able to get into the rhythm more quickly and that‘s why we have lost a lot of time and energy. Karel, who completed almost 150 laps during the last three days, was quite tired in the end and that’s why we couldn’t push to the limit in the last moments of the test. It’s a shame, because now we have to wait for three weeks before we find out if we found the right way.“
source: Cardion AB Press Release
