Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa says he is in better shape going into the opening MotoGP race than this time last year as work on the RC213V’s power delivery allowed him to lap quicker and set a better pace in testing at Losail.

The little Spaniard launched himself into third on the timesheets during the final day in Qatar and he says that although there is still work to do, he is a lot happier.

“We made some improvements with the feeling and little by little the lap times started to improve, the feeling started to improve. Also the fast lap time improved. The team did a great job today. We did a lot of good work in the last three hours of the test and basically it finished positive. There is still a lot of things to get faster, better, consistency but overall we gain confidence test by test,” said Pedrosa at the track.

“So we hope to transfer a little bit this confidence to the motivation of the GP to the first race and try to do a good weekend. Yesterday I did kind of a simulation – not fully. We already saw some parts we can improve. Because yesterday we didn't find a good pace, today we focused on improving the pace.

“It's more easy to keep it. First you need to have a good pace. We focused on that, achieved it so I'm positive about this. It's a bit more smooth in general. There are still things on the mapping that we need to improve. A bit on the suspension, but we're still working on it.”