Italian megastar Valentino Rossi continues to develop Ducati’s Desmosedici GP11 and left the opening day of the Sepang test in Malaysia satisfied that he’s making progress in the pre-season.

Rossi continued his important work on the GP11’s setup, completing 53 laps and choosing some base settings on which his crew plans to concentrate in the future.

Rossi was ninth fastest with a 2:01.999, marginally over a second off the pace from Casey Stoner’s quickest lap of the test so far.

“We can be satisfied with today as a first day, because we’re a second from the top, like we were at the end of the first test but without trying a late ‘time attack’ with the soft tyre like the others did,” Rossi commented.

“For the most part today, I was between fifth and sixth place, which is the goal we had set.”

Rossi admits that his troublesome shoulder is still causing him some discomfort when on the bike, but the rest will come down to bike development.

“I’m still losing about three tenths due to the shoulder, because I’m still stronger in the left turns, whereas I’m normally the opposite – the rest we’ll have to find by working on the bike,” he continued.

“I’m also happy because we spent all our time on the hard tyres, which we struggled with before today.

“In the end, we chose one of the two setups that we had settled upon at the last test, and that will now be our base to work from, and the one on which we’ll concentrate our efforts in the next couple of days.”

American teammate Nicky Hayden was 12th fastest, just over half a second in arrears of Rossi.