Ducati's Valentino Rossi is worried he is still a second slower than reigning MotoGP World Champion Casey Stoner after finally getting a full dry day's testing in at Sepang but has been leapfrogged on the timesheets by satellite bikes from Yamaha, Honda and his own manufacturer.

The Doctor managed a 2'01.550 in the last session but saw the likes of Cal Crutchlow, Andrea Dovizioso, Hector Barbera and Alvaro Bautista all put in faster times especially after some new settings made the Desmosedici worse for the Italian on corner entry and he ended up slower than last time out at the Malaysian track where he set a 2'00.824.

“One small positive note to the day is that we reduced the gap to the front a little bit. It was 1.2 seconds, and now it’s one second. It’s also nice that the new electronics work well, but it hurts being down on the timesheets compared to all the others. We tried a bunch of things in order to take a step forward from the first test, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to do it and were actually worse," said Rossi.

"It was harder for me to ride well compared to three weeks ago, especially my corner speed. It’s true that this test was more difficult in terms of weather and track conditions, but it seemed to affect us more than the others. Honestly, I expected to do better than tenth. We were also unfortunate because at the best part of the day, when I did a 2:01.5 and we had some tyres to try to lower the time further, we had a problem with the fork that cost us some time.

"Maybe without that we would have cut another three or four tenths and been further up, but our pace is still about seven tenths back. Honestly, that’s not a huge amount, but anyway we’re still behind. We’re not pleased with how it went this time, but we have to try and work hard and see what happens at Jerez, where the track is very different than this one, with much different weather and temperatures. We’ll see how we do there.”