MotoGP News Update: 02/01/2007

Crash.net - These pictures show former five-times MotoGP world champion Valentino Rossi and team-mate Colin Edwards in Yamaha's special one-off blue livery, being used during this weekend's Jerez test.

With the team's new title sponsor, expected to be Fiat, still to be officially announced, Yamaha has elected to use the special livery for the final pre-season test - the first day of which was interrupted by poor weather - before unveiling its definitive new look in time for the season-opening Qatar Grand Prix on March 10.

It wasn't a headline grabbing debut for the new colours, with both riders left outside the top ten on Friday as they played safe in the tricky dry/wet conditions - but 11th fastest Edwards still believes promising progress was made.

"Actually that was a really useful day for us, despite the weather!" declared the former double WSBK champion. "Obviously the times don't really show it, but I'm not worried about those because the conditions really limited what we could do with regards to going fast. It wasn't nice out there with the patchy conditions and it was really quite dangerous; it was obvious that whoever took the most risks was going to be fastest today!

"Anyway, we came here with our 'smooth-track' setting which worked so well in Qatar and tried it here, which is much bumpier. The good thing about today is that we think we now understand why it doesn't work so well on bumpy tracks and so tomorrow we're going to work on changing that and getting it to work everywhere," he explained. "That's the aim for tomorrow and hopefully we'll be successful in that task, which will put us in much better stead as far as adjusting the bike to different tracks goes. We were obviously nowhere near our times from December today but we know the bike is better than it was then so I am sure that once the track dries out properly and it gets a bit warmer, we'll get a lot faster."

"The most important thing about this test for us is that it gives us the chance to see how our new bike has changed from the test here in December to now," added 13th fastest Rossi. "We've had three tests in between and the bike has changed quite a bit, plus we've had some new parts for the engine and the bike is a bit faster. Today wasn't great because the conditions were bad, it didn't really dry out all day so it wasn't possible to go so fast. Anyway though, I am impressed at some of the times of my rivals in these conditions!

"I was quite fast at the start when it was quite wet, but really it wasn't enough to do a real wet-weather test. So after today we still can't see how much we've improved from the last test, but hopefully tomorrow will be better. We've found some interesting things though and I think it will be better tomorrow.