The Ducati Marlboro squad’s initial day of testing with Casey Stoner and Nicky Hayden came with constructive results, both competitors were happy with the performance of the 2010 prototype.

Stoner, second quickest of all 17 racers present, was satisfied with the fresh engine and is looking to further focus on the set-up of his motorbike to resolve minor issues with chatter.

Stoner's lap timed at 2’01.902, he says: “This first day was a bit difficult to understand: we started off with a setting that was quite good and that allowed us to make reasonably good lap times. We thought we would improve as the day went on but we had a few problems with chatter. We tried a lot of different combinations trying to make the bike feel a little bit better but we couldn’t really get an improvement. To be honest it was difficult to work out why because the track conditions were particularly difficult - it was so hot that it was actually hard to understand if you were making an improvement on the bike or not.”

The Aussie, who finished with 42 laps, continues: “In any case I’m really happy with the new engine, I think that with the other one we would have struggled more. Now the bike in general feels very good, very balanced and I’m happy with it. Hopefully the weather will be a little cooler tomorrow so that we can understand better if the changes we try are the right ones.”

Rain finished the day slightly earlier.  Hayden, who brought in 59 laps with a best time of 2’02.792, says: “Overall the day was positive. It went quite fast actually and at the end of the day when we were ready to do some more laps the rain came and cut it a little bit short. It would be nice to have had the chance to do some more laps, but overall the bike was feeling quite good. We made a couple of little tweaks that helped us but we struggled a lot for edge chatter. There’s not much testing before the start of the season so we’ve got to move fast: day one is in the bag, we have established a good starting point and we go from here”.