Demanding qualifying leaves Suzuki with work to do

Chris Vermeulen looked impressive in Saturday morning´s final practice session, lapping fourth quickest at the 4.226m Misano circuit as he continued to improve on his race tyre lap-times. He was unable to turn that form into a qualifying time good enough for the front two rows but heads the third line on the grid as he attempt to repeat last year´s podium position.

Loris Capirossi made several changes to his Suzuki GSV-R after the morning session – where he again looked very competitive as he posted the seventh quickest time – but the alterations didn´t quite work out as planned, leaving him with a tough starting position for the 28-lap race. The experienced Italian will start his record breaking 277th Grand Prix in eleventh position.

Chris Vermeulen - seventh

`We´ve had quite a good second day here. We changed some set-up things on the bike and tested quite a few of the tyres from our allocation. We tried some very hard compounds for these hot conditions and they seem to be working very well. This afternoon on qualifiers the tyre worked pretty well in the new chassis, but I never quite managed to do that perfect lap and unfortunately we didn´t quite make it to the second row of the grid. Having said that, seventh is one of my better dry qualifying positions of the season so we are definitely making improvements. My race pace is strong for tomorrow and I think with a good start we can fight for the podium!´

Loris Capirossi - eleventh

`I am a bit upset with my qualifying position because we found a really good set-up yesterday and we were not too bad this morning and we wanted to continue like that. But this afternoon was a bit hotter and we made some changes and on the qualifiers we struggled a bit. I am quite confident for tomorrow, it won´t be easy starting from eleventh, but I´ll be aggressive early on and my rhythm with race tyres is really good so we´ll have to see what happens!´