EPayme Yamaha’s John Hopkins is over the moon after his debut on the R1 at Cartagena and believes he is in good shape after being able to lap consistently fast on used tyres, a trait of the Yamaha that champion Josh Brookes exploited so well last season.

Hopkins ended the test in seventh place on the unofficial lap chart, setting a best of 1’34.0s but was able to put those times in all day.

"I feel even happier at the end of this test than I did when I first rode the new Yamaha. Honestly I am absolutely over the moon with everything really; the mindset coming into this test was never to go out and get some crazy outright lap time and the focus has purely been on getting accustomed to the bike and getting a good feel for the bike,” said Hopkins.

"I think this is one time in my career where we have spent the majority of the test on used tyres, which makes what we have done even more positive. We have been able to do a lap time, then stay doing consistent lap times that are strongly competitive from what I have seen on used tyres which is a huge bonus.

“You know bikes that I have ridden in the past, we can always squeeze a lap time with a fresh tyre and we would manage to unfortunately drop back quite a bit once the tyres have gone off, but we have gone out here session after session with the same set of tyres and the lap time has stayed the same and the feeling of that is nice.”