Bridgestone cautious about China

The Michelin riders struggled at Istanbul Park, with polesitter Valentino Rossi slipping to 10th in the race. Nicky Hayden was the highest-placed rider on the French rubber, but he could only manage seventh behind the Bridgestone users.

But Yamada remains cautious about Bridgestone's chances of a similar performance at Shanghai.

"We are not getting carried away with the performance of our tyres in Turkey two weeks ago," he said.

"We were very pleased with the competitiveness and durability of our tyres at a track that has previously been difficult for us, but China will present us with renewed challenges.

"Similar to Turkey, the track is quite a recent addition to the MotoGP calendar but the technicalities are quite different, so we require a different approach to tyre development."

Yamada added that Bridgestone's Shanghai tyres would be from the same compound 'family' as its Istanbul tyres.

"We introduced a new generation of compound in Turkey which were designed to cope with the low-grip nature of the Istanbul Park track," he said.

"The selection of soft, medium and hard specification tyres that we are bringing to China have been based on this new generation compound, specifically in an effort to combat the grip and consistency problems that we faced in Shanghai in the last two years.

"China will pose a different set of circumstances than in Istanbul two weeks ago, but we hope our range of tyres will show a similar year-on-year increase in performance."