Used with permission from www.mcnews.com.au: (Note: This report should have been posted Friday but in the rush to finish the March issue of Roadracing World & Motorcycle Technology and get it shipped off to the printer, it didn’t happen.) By Trevor Hedge Day Three Wrap-up: Testing continued at Phillip Island with near perfect conditions in the morning greeting riders before the sun really started getting serious around lunchtime which saw the track temperature creep above 50°C and thus times dropped off appreciably in the afternoon session. The outright pacesetter was Mat Mladin who recorded a lot of laps in the 1:32 bracket with an unofficial best of 1:32.2. Satisfied with how much they had to get through he called it a day early in the afternoon. Troy Corser completed an entire race simulation before lunch and was more than 10 seconds quicker than the race simulation the team completed here last year. He was more than half-a-minute quicker over a full race distance that what they recorded during the race last year. Corser then had a lengthy lunch break before heading out again later in the day to put in a huge number of laps along with teammate Yukio Kagayama. The Suzuki men rode right up until the 5:45 p.m. daily deadline. Steve Martin quickly got straight down to steady 1:33 laptimes with an unofficial best of 1:33.4 to be third quickest. The high temperatures put a spoiler on Steve Martin’s plans to conduct a full race simulation in the afternoon so the South Australian plan to do two full race simulations the next day. The Yamaha France boys were again hard at work all day but still do not look anywhere near the pace of the other men. Mid-1:34s were the best they could manage but the most troubling part was that it took qualifying tires for them to get that low while the other riders concentrated on race tires. New FPR rider Craig Jones continued to get acclimatized to his new machine and the fast Phillip Island layout and got a lot of laps in. He got down to 1:35s and continues to chip away here and there as he learns more about his new machine and the circuit. The Briton turned 21 on Monday. Corser commented that a lot of bikes had a form of electronic traction control or ‘anti-spin’ last year while the Suzuki squad didn’t. He also said that they do have such a system this year but the tires have really made a big step forward, commenting that the tires were perhaps as much as ‘half a second a lap quicker than last year’. Mladin worked his way through testing various 2006 kit parts on his GSX-R1000 along with undertaking a lot of tire testing for Dunlop, which will continue on the fourth day. Most teams were expected to stay on tomorrow for the fourth and final day of the test. Unofficial Times – Day Three 1. Mladin 1:32.2 2. Corser 1:32.79 3. Martin 1:33.40 4. Kagayama 1m3:.68 5. Abe 1:34.5 6. Gimbert 1:34.6 7. Nakatomi 1:35.1 8. Jones 1:35.6 Day Four/Final Wrap-up: It was clear to all and sundry as soon as they stuck their heads out the windows of their respective hotel rooms on the fourth morning of the test that little would be achieved in the way of fast lap times. However the Suzuki and Foggy Petronas men still got in some useful testing while the Yamaha men were nowhere to be seen. The problem was not rain but very strong gusty winds that take riders’ front wheels from under them at high speed places like turn three, around the back of the circuit and the crucial turns 11 and 12 onto the main straight. Not nice at over 250kph. Mat Mladin only had a couple of things to get through in the morning, testing various rubber for Dunlop and the fine tuning of some brake components. The Yoshimura Suzuki men had that done and dusted by 11:00 a.m. and started packing up to head home. Troy Corser practiced his starts quite a lot which led to speculation that the improved race electronics package on his 2006 GSX-R1000 might have included some sort of launch control system. However from watching his right and left hands it still looked as though the only thing controlling the launch was the deft touch of Corser’s fingers. Corser was satisfied the team had achieved what it had set out to do and left the circuit just before noon to fly home. Yukio Kagayama again put in plenty of track time and would surely have done more laps than any other rider this week, perhaps double the number of laps put in by some. In the afternoon he was the only rider on the track and cut lap-after-lap in very hot and windy conditions while teammate Corser had been long gone from the circuit hours earlier. It seemed clear that the fastest times had already been set this week and there was virtually nil chance of anyone improving their best times from yesterday. So at a glance it was Mladin the quickest man of the test with just over half-a-second on the Pirelli-shod GSX-R of World Superbike Champion Troy Corser. Many will read various things into that and will interpret it various ways according to their own prejudices but really with the difference in machine specifications and tires the difference is of little consequence. Any comparison of the current outright speed of Australia’s most successful active road racers is really a moot point. For that to be decided we would need machines prepared to the same rules on the same rubber and that is not going to happen at any time in the foreseeable future. Both men have Australian and American Superbike Championships to their credit and Corser has now also notched up two World Superbike crowns while Mat has been busy in America dominating their domestic Superbike Championship to a level that is unlikely to ever be repeated. So while plenty of armchair experts no doubt already think they ‘know’ the answer to which rider is quicker, in reality we don’t know and are not going to know any time soon. Both riders are very comfortable where they are and respect each other’s achievements greatly. They themselves know best of all that any talk of this week being a pissing contest between them is a bit ridiculous. Although at the same time you can rest assured that the Yoshimura squad and Dunlop will be quietly satisfied that they were the quickest men at Phillip Island this week. But at the same time they also know it is nothing to be swinging from the rafters about as the comparisons are not done on an equal basis. Steve Martin certainly showed that he should be able to put the Foggy Petronas machine somewhere near the front pack this season and he was consistently much faster than the Yamaha France squad of Abe, Gimbert and Nakatomi. Briton Craig Jones turned 21 early this week and his four days of lapping Phillip Island on the FPR Superbike will have been invaluable to the youngster as he learns to come to grips with his new mount. The planned race simulation distances for today did not work out for the FPR boys who called it a day just after lunch and headed for some laps of the new 760m go-kart circuit that replicates the Phillip Island layout on the hire karts. Overall a very useful four days for everyone present and fantastic that Phillip Island was able to provide them with a dry track for the whole duration. The wind did cause a few problems but that didn’t stop the teams being able to test the components that they came here to evaluate. The Yamaha Germany squad of Kevin Curtain and Broc Parkes will be hoping for similar weather when they test at the Island next week. Jan 17/18/19/20 Testing – Best Overall Times 1. Mladin 1:32.2 2. Corser 1:32.79 3. Martin 1:33.40 4. Kagayama 1:33.68 5. Abe 1:34.5 6. Gimbert 1:34.6 7. Nakatomi 1:35.1 8. Jones 1:35.6