After a slight delay waiting for conditions to warm up, the Samsung Crescent Racing team has enjoyed a highly-productive first day of testing at the Guadix circuit in Spain. The Guadix test is quite different to the Cartagena one of the past few days, as it’s only Samsung Crescent Racing and a few British Superstock and Supersport riders sharing the track. This means it’s effectively ‘open pit lane’ – so the riders can freely enter and leave the track all day – whereas at Cartagena they were confined to a schedule of organised sessions, which has meant the team has been able to intensively test their new-for-2011 components, with John Hopkins putting in 63 laps and Jon Kirkham 80 laps on Tuesday. John Hopkins: “We had a new track to learn today and with a delay in getting going it might seem that we wouldn’t have had such a good day. But it was very good; with an open pit lane we were able to rack up a lot of laps and work through quite a bit of new kit. There was the challenge of finding new settings for a new track as well, but we got the bike dialled-in pretty quick and it’s feeling good around here already. I’m looking forward to our next two days.” Jon Kirkham: “We got stuck in today, I’ve tried a lot of new stuff, including an electronics package and I’m learning that we can create quite a different feel to the bike. It’s been a fascinating day trying things, rather than just chasing lap times – and we’re making progress with every lap. It’s all good.” Jack Valentine – Team Manager: “We’ve shifted the focus with this second phase of our testing. The lads have developed a good feel for the bikes now, so we’ve been introducing new parts for them to evaluate. We’ve tried new settings in the forks and a whole new swinging arm. ‘JK’ also trialled a new electronics strategy today which worked extremely well so we’ll be passing that onto ‘Hopper’ to try tomorrow. “We’ve got a lot done today despite a delay in getting started. We’re not out there trying to break lap records, we’re doing serious testing, and yet we’re significantly faster than we were here on the first day last year. The only cloud on the horizon is literally a cloud – there’s a forecast for rain. But we had the same forecast for today, so let’s hope it misses us again.”