Following a race against time to have the new 2017 CBR1000RR ready for World Superbike testing at Jerez, Honda team technical manager Pieter Breddels left satisfied with the first outing.

American Nicky Hayden impressed with the sixth-fastest time and within reach of the front-runners, while German Stefan Bradl was ninth following two days.

Both riders worked hard with their crews over the two days while trying to get an early understanding of the new package, before making some first set-up changes.

“For being the very first outing with the new Blade, we can say we’re quite satisfied,” he explained. “We did not have any issue with the engines, so we managed to do a great deal of laps.

“We gathered a lot of data in order to understand the behaviour of the new ride-by-wire system, especially in relation to the throttle body, and after some teething problems things ran smoothly. The engine is already a little bit faster than last year’s one, knowing this one is far from the spec we will bring to Phillip Island.

“The engine mapping was still not optimised and that made it a bit more difficult to set everything up, although this had to be expected. We’ll have this one sorted before Australia. Time to go to Portimao now, where only Stefan has ridden, but not raced before.”

The Honda WorldSBK Team will be back on track this weekend at Portimao with another two-day test, the last one before travelling to Phillip Island for the traditional World Superbike official test and the opening round of the season.