Yamaha happy despite problems

Colin Edwards and Valentino Rossi had topped the timesheets on the first two days of the test, but they could only manage the third and fifth-quickest times on Thursday.

Edwards struggled with the Michelin qualifying tyre which the likes of Dani Pedrosa put to such good use to go quickest during the day, while Rossi had rear tyre issues on a long run.

"It's been a good test overall, despite running into a few problems," said Rossi. "It's better to find these problems now so we have the chance to fix them.

"The long run was ok, the situation with the rear tyre wasn't perfect but we knew it wasn't going to be and it didn't do anything we didn't expect. Anyway, we're not worried about it.

"We weren't able to stay on top, but we were quite fast and our bike is good, so I'm happy.

Edwards was halfway through a long run when the session was red-flagged for John Hopkins crash, which meant that he had to do the run again in the afternoon.

"Our engineers really needed me to have another go in the afternoon as we needed some information about fuel consumption," he said.

"We tried a qualifier this morning and we actually had a tiny bit of movement with that which was a surprise after how fantastic it was in Sepang.

"Valentino had a go later and I think he fixed the issue, so we're not panicking about that."