Pedrosa and Repsol Honda reunite for official team presentation in Kuala Lumpur

The Repsol Honda Team, 2011 Triple Crown Champions, hosted the media at a Team Presentation in the Pan Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur last night with a press conference and welcome party.

After the winter break, team riders Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa returned to the media spotlight refreshed and eager to start the new season. Alongside them were HRC team bosses, Shuhei Nakamoto (HRC Executive Vice President), Hideki Iwano (Director, Assistant to Team Principal), Shinichi Kokubu (Technical Director) and Livio Suppo (Communications and Marketing Director). This was also the first opportunity for the media to see the new RC213V bike complete with 2011 World Champion Casey Stoner’s number ‘1’ emblazoned on the front.

The team arrived in Malaysia on Saturday and returned to the Sepang track on Sunday for the first time since Marco Simoncelli’s tragic accident in the race on 23rd October. As a mark of respect, the whole team visited the corner where Marco lost his life, laid a wreath of flowers and held a minutes silence.

This season the MotoGP world returns to 1000cc bikes and HRC head into the 2012 season determined to retain the World Championship.

Dani Pedrosa: “It’s nice to be back with the team for the first Sepang test. I’m really excited to get on the bike again after the test we did in Valencia in November.
Sepang is a good track for testing and we have still many things to discover out about the new bike. It’s been a long time since we were last riding and at the first test it’s always important to get the feeling back, the first sensations.
We will have three long days here to work with the team and HRC and it’s necessary to be very focused in order to get good information to move forward for the second test. I guess the main target in this test will be to know the bike and the new Bridgestone tyres”.

Source: Repsol Media