Jacque to return to action on Thursday

The Frenchman banged his head during an off at Turn Two on Tuesday and, although passed fit by doctors to run on Wednesday, he elected to sit it out so he was fully recovered for the final day.

"I'm still pretty sore," said Jacque. "I wanted to ride, but after the medical check up this morning we made the decision to sit out Wednesday's test, instead of risking further injury and a longer delay.

"I'm sorry for the team, because I know how much work we need to do before the start of the season, but I hope we can catch up on our test schedule."

Jacque's Kawasaki team have had a pretty intense time in terms of crash repairs at Losail, with teammate Randy de Puniet crashing his main bike with an off on Wednesday.

He was uninjured in the accident and was able to resume running on his spare machine.

De Puniet said: "I'm not completely sure why (I crashed), but it felt like the wind pushed me wide, and I lost the front trying to regain the right line. I was unhurt, but the bike was a wreck."

Despite the setbacks, Kawasaki's technical manager Naoya Kaneko was happy with the progress the team have made so far this week.

"Randy's crash was unfortunate, but the important thing was that he was uninjured and it didn't delay our planned test programme," he said. "Our overall assessment of today is positive. Our target was to evaluate a range of different tyre options and also to improve the set-up of the bike.

"I'm confident we'll end the test with a good idea of the tyres we will need for the race here."