Casey Stoner will take the engine from a brand new RC213V that Honda brought to the Mugello MotoGP test and expects to use it at Laguna while the rest will be sent back to Japan as the reigning champion could find no positive advantages over the older chassis he raced on Sunday.
HRC wheeled out one bike each for Stoner and team-mate Dani Pedrosa, and the Australian was scathing about its performance, saying it was hard and heavy to make change direction, so he will use the standard chassis and bolt the new motor in for the California race.
"The new engine I'm quite happy with, it gives us a better feeling off the bottom and I'm able to ride a bit smoother, especially with change of direction at this track, you can control it a lot better but as far as the new bike is concerned, chassis, everything, I wasn't so impressed. I didn't really get any benefits from it, there was no positive points, so we decided to stay with the one we have now," said Stoner, speaking to bikesportnews.com.
"I don't want the new chassis, I wasn't happy with it. It felt very hard, very heavy to change direction. There were no benefits, only disadvantages over the standard bike we have now so I'm not interested to try it again at this point. I didn't get any more front feeling or rear grip out of it, just couldn't ride it like I could the standard bike. Normally, we can adapt to a new bike and find its good points, but we couldn't find any. Hopefully, if everything goes well, we should be able to use the new engine in Laguna."
Stoner made some modifications to the front of the current bike which he says gave him more feel but also increased the amount of chatter he is experiencing. He is hoping engineers can find a compromise with the setting and intends to try in again in a fortnight.
"We tried something else with the front of the bike and we managed to get a bit better feeling in the front and I was able to run a bit more corner speed at the end of the day but it was difficult to know if it was track conditions or the bike so we'd like to confirm that again in Laguna," said Stoner.
"The adjustments we made to the front helped us in some of the areas we have been struggling with all weekend but I don't know if it going to help at another track. Unfortunately, we get more feeling but we created more chatter, mainly on the left side which we have been having trouble with but hopefully we can understand why it created more chatter, not less, and we can comeback halfway and find a happy medium."
