Honda World Superbike Team’s Nicky Hayden hailed the two-day pre-season test at Jerez as ‘useful’, as the Kentucky rider completed his first laps on the all-new CBR1000RR SP2.
The 2006 MotoGP World Champion made the step over to WorldSBK with Honda last season and gelled with the series instantly, taking his maiden victory just six rounds into the championship in Malaysia.
Despite a decent first year in WorldSBK, Hayden was never expected to challenge for the title as the Fireblade was well past its best-by date. This had many looking to 2017 as the American’s first opportunity for championship success with the arrival of the new bike.
The Ten Kate squad only took delivery of the new Fireblade two weeks before the opening test of the year, giving the Dutch outfit very little time to get the machine prepared for Hayden and team-mate Stefan Bradl.
Therefore the two days in Spain were all about ironing out the gremlins and finding some sort of a base set-up. Tuesday was devoted totally to bedding in the bike, and luckily no major dramas befell the team. Hayden completed 36 laps on day one, managing a best effort of 1m41.830s to go ninth quickest.
Wednesday’s session saw Hayden and the team push a little harder, putting a further 67 laps on the new bike including a run out on qualifying tyres. He improved by over a second to a 1m40.548s to go sixth overall, though admits that this puts the team closer to the top of the pile than they actually are.
The team still have a long way to go before the new Honda is race ready, but their first outing with it was a largely successful one. They now head to Portimao for two more days of running this weekend, where they will hope to build on the data gathered in Jerez.
“It has been two useful days of testing here at Jerez and luckily the weather was on our side in the afternoons,” said Hayden.
“The team has done a great job to put the bike together and bring it here, despite the short time they had available to prepare them. We used yesterday almost exclusively as a shakedown day and in the afternoon we were able to make some decent runs, while today we tried to work more on the bike performance, just to get the bike in the right window, and a bit of a direction. We’ve made a couple of steps but it’s obvious we’re still behind our competitors at the moment.
“There’s still a lot of work to do and time to make up; when we used the qualifying tyre the time we set made us look closer than we actually are. Overall we found some positives today: we worked a lot on finding more grip and the bike ran smoothly without any glitch. The team has a little bit of time now to understand the data before Portimão.”
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