Roberts tests another chassis, third on 'old'.

Kenny Roberts Junior posted the third fastest time in Friday free practice for Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix, putting him on target for a third successive front-row start in Saturday's qualifying session.

World Champion in 2000 and in his first season back with his father Kenny Roberts's team, Kenny Jr is continuing a strong run on the quickly-competitive hybrid KR211V, which marries a V5 Honda engine with a Team Roberts chassis.

KR Jr posted a best time of 2min 2.563secs, putting him 0.5secs from second placed Dani Pedrosa - injured later in the second session - and 0.8secs behind fastest man Loris Capirossi.

The breakthrough for the KR221V came with chassis revisions seven races ago. Since that Italian GP, Roberts has qualified on the front row three times, taken a best finish of third at Catalunya and twice finished fourth and fifth

The project is still under development, with the team testing yet another new chassis on Friday at Sepang, although Kenny's best time came late in the hour-long session came on the older version of the second-generation bike - which the team now expects to stick with for the rest of the weekend.

"We had a good first run with the newest chassis today. We actually changed the chassis between sessions today. The guys actually did it in an hour and 15 minutes - so they've either been sandbagging all year, or they worked to the maximum!" said Roberts Jr in typical deadpan style.

"The session was as normal. We had my bike from the last race. Everything was going okay and we tried a few tyres. Then we tried the new chassis, and that was better yet. We didn't expect it to be like that right away, so we had my other bike ready. With 15 minutes to go we changed everything over to the old bike, and I set my time on that bike. I think I could have gone a bit quicker but there was some traffic on the last lap.

"It's not that this is a good track for me," he insisted. "The Honda-Michelin combination, with ?hlins and the team, then everything should be good. With a great motor and great tyres, you shouldn't have bad tracks. It should be good everywhere."

"We're trying different chassis today, and that was encouraging. We have two new ones, with a different construction, fabricated rather than machined, all with different tweaks," added father and team owner Roberts Sr. "We are still chasing things down. In the end he went back to the Catalunya bike, and that was the fastest. I think we'll probably stick with that one."