Edwards: Yamaha set for improvements

The American ended up 11th on the timesheets, with teammate Valentino Rossi two places further back, but he was far from disheartened by how the day had gone.

In fact, with the poor weather meaning times were fairly unrepresentative of overall performance, Edwards was delighted with something that his Yamaha Factory Racing team had found on their M1.

"Actually that was a really useful day for us, despite the weather," said Edwards after the test. "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.

"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."

Rossi was also encouraged by how the bike felt compared to the last time he tested here in December - although believed a better comparison would come if the weather improved.

"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," said the Italian. "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.

"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.

"Of course the objective of this weekend is to be ready for the race when we return here and I hope we will also be able to go faster than we did here in December. The biggest changes since we were here last have been made to the suspension, especially in the front, but today we couldn't really see the potential of these changes. If it becomes warmer we will also try to find some good tyres for this track, so let's hope for sunshine."