MotoGP: ‘Too early to tell’ on Honda engine, says Pedrosa

Dani Pedrosa has admitted that it’s still too early to tell if the improvements made to the new Honda RCV213 engine for the 2017 season will make any difference to the bike’s struggling acceleration, even after completing 83 laps of the Valencia circuit in the past tow days.

Pedrosa had a strong end to the day, finishing in fifth overall, but admitted afterwards that it’s just still too early to tell how much improvements they’ve made as the continue to work through their development plan.

“Today we were able to ride with the new bike a little more and further compare the characteristics. We continued to take things fairly easy physically and not put in too many laps in order to keep up the recovery, but we tried to understand more about the new bike, to see how the tyres, suspension and mapping work with it.

“I think there are things that are positive and other details that we’ll need to continue working on. We must take the data we’ve gathered and carefully analyse it in order to understand what step to take next with the bike.”

His thoughts were echoed by teammate and reigning world champion Marc Marquez, who finished second overall.

“Today was a good day. We started the pre-season better than last year, and we hope to continue to constantly progress from now on. At this track we found a good base setup and a good rhythm, and we’ll see how it goes from now. We hope to continue like this. We didn’t do a ‘time attack,’ and we also didn’t test the new Michelin front, as we eventually used all the track time available to make long exits and also a couple of 10-lap mini-long runs.”