Honda happy with conservative Pedrosa

Pedrosa will start only 12th in tomorrow's Czech Grand Prix, but managed to stay out of trouble in the torrential rain. The Spaniard is not yet back to full fitness after sustaining arm injuries when he crashed out of the lead at the Sachsenring in similar wet conditions last month.

"Dani rode very sensibly today, the big thing is that he didn't fall," said Yamano.

"It is always easy to fall in the rain, so he was riding a little more conservatively than usual because he didn't want to risk further damage to his left hand and wrist."

Pedrosa admitted that the injury had continued to trouble him during qualifying, but felt the deteroriating conditions were a bigger problem.

"I wore a heavier strapping on my left hand today, for better support, but anyway the cold weather gave me more pain," he said.

"The track was very wet this afternoon. I tried to improve my lap time, even though the rain got heavier, but I couldn't improve, so I will start the race from the fourth row.

"Of course, I'm not happy about starting from there, because it won't help us in the race. If the race is run in the dry I hope we will have a dry warm-up so that we can work on our suspension set-up and tyre choice. If it is dry in the morning we will work hard to make improvements so we can have the best-possible race."

Yamano addded that Honda had brought several upgrades to Brno so could expect to be more competitive should race day dawn dry, despite Friday's tyre problems.

"We made some small improvements to the machine today but it was a shame that we didn't get any dry track time", he said. "We expect better tomorrow. For the race, we have already adjusted the machine to get him more front-end confidence from the front tyre."