Ending up second in the rankings after three days of testing at Portimao in Portugal, the weather played its part in disrupting some of the talented young rider’s plans.

The first day of testing for Joan and his team-mate Katsuaki Fujiwara on the Ninja ZX-6R machines began well, but rain on day two, and a still damp track on the final day, held back the progress of the team as it continued its preparations for the new season.

Partly because of the changeable track surface, both Joan and Kats set their best laps on the very first day, with Joan on a 1’45.292 and Kats overall fifth fastest from 14 runners, on 1’45.988.

The team will now make preparations for its next private test, at Calafat on 8 and 9 February, before heading to Australia for yet more official tests against their 2010 Supersport rivals. These sessions take place shortly before the first race of the new season, which is scheduled for February 28, at Phillip Island.

Joan Lascorz: “We had a bit of a problem at the end. In the wet I crashed and the team rebuilt the bike. In the wet the bike felt OK, but when the track was dry I could push harder, I realised that there was still something not straight or something wrong on the bike. By that stage we had little time left to try the second bike. It was looking like I could set a better time on the second bike anyway, but I had a front-end slide and lost the fast lap, even if I did not crash. We made some progress anyway, and were fastest on day one, before the weather changed.”

Katsuaki Fujiwara: “The test was OK, and today we tried some soft springs, then hard springs, to try to get more feedback. Our winter tests have been important so that we can make changes to the bike to understand how they affect the race setup.”