Marco Melandri will spend time today lapping Imola during the official World Superbike test trying to figure out why the chatter which he thought had been eliminated from his BMW S1000RR came back to haunt him the second race yesterday.

The mystery vibration, which he had experienced in pre-season but dialled out for the race two at Phillip Island, came back with a vengeance as it had in the first leg Down Under and added to the gearbox woes he suffered in race one which caused the former MotoGP man to take to the pitlane.

“I think I could say that it was a negative day for me. We have been struggling with the gearbox and in race one I went straight into the pit lane entrance. Afterwards I was working hard to catch up. My pace was not too far from the top three guys. In race two I had quite a lot of issues with chattering, as was the case at Phillip Island. I could not push properly, and I destroyed the tyres so much more than in race one. I could not do anything. We do not know yet why the bike is changing. We will work on this tomorrow and I hope that we will be able to make some steps forward," said the Italian.