Pedrosa And Dovizioso Goes With 2008 Honda Chassis

Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso will not have a 'new' Repsol Honda for the 2009 racing season,may be to end the technical instability experienced at the factory team in recent seasons.Here is the both riders statement:

Pedrosa said,

"I am happy that we can continue with the bike from last year, because since 2005 I have changed machine every winter," said the 125 and double 250cc world champion, speaking to Crash.net outside his pit garage at Sepang. "So it's always been difficult at the beginning of the new season and when I find more-or-less something that I like it is already the middle or the end of the season. So I didn't want any big changes this time.

"There is no difference really between the bike I finished last season with and the bike I have now," confirmed the Catalan. "I didn't ask Honda for anything new as such; there were just some items that we wanted to improve such as braking, because we can see that our rivals are very strong in braking now."

"The best part of this bike at the moment is that it has a powerful engine," Dani said, the only Honda rider to win an 800cc race. "The chassis I'd like to improve because with the Bridgestone tyres it's kind of difficult to ride it - with the Michelin it was a little smoother - but the grip performance is better now."

While Dovizioso said,

"I had already tried both the old and new chassis at Jerez [in November], but we compared them again here because it is the best track to understand exactly what the difference between them is,” the Italian told Crash.net at the end of day two. "We need to have a meeting now to decide which way to follow, because the new chassis is a little bit better during braking but is worse on corner exit."

The outcome of that team meeting was a decision to go with the older chassis design.

"We have fixed the line to follow for the season," said Repsol Honda team manager Kazuhiko Yamano.

Dovizioso then repeated his eighth position during the third and final day of testing, leaving him 0.9sec from the top and half a second behind Toni Elias, also riding a factory Honda but for the satellite Gresini team.

Dovizioso listed the strengths and weaknesses of his machine as follows:

"The engine is much, much better than what I had last year in terms of power, but the delivery is too aggressive. In terms of the chassis the stability on the front is much better than last year, but still we have a problem with stability at the rear, especially during the last part of braking.

"I think the main problem in terms of braking is the clutch," he revealed.

Dovizioso said he thinks team-mate Dani Pedrosa feels the same about the bike, but isn't sure.

Meanwhile, making things more complicated for Dovizioso is that he spent his debut premier-class season on Michelin tyres, at JiR Team Scot.

"One of our problems is that we come from Michelin. So we don't know exactly how the chassis and Bridgestone tyres need to work together," said Andrea, who made his MotoGP podium debut with third in October's Malaysian Grand Prix. "The casing of the Michelin was very soft, but with Bridgestone it is harder so it is difficult to put enough weight on the tyre. It is almost the opposite of the Michelin."