Good first day for Vermeulen in France

Rizla Suzuki´s Australian star Chris Vermeulen had a positive first day´s free practice, in readiness for Sunday´s Alice Grand Prix de France at Le Mans, briefly topping the timesheets in both sessions, before finally recording the fifth fastest time of the day (1´34.630).

His team-mate Loris Capirossi could not quite match that performance, as his best effort of 1´35.256 left him 11th overall, but the experienced Italian will study the data to help him improve on his position on Saturday.

Chris Vermeulen - 5th

`Le Mans is a special track for me after my first Grand Prix win here last year. I have great memories and I´m really looking forward to this weekend. I think we have got the base settings about right, we progressed a lot in China – despite our misfortune in the race – and we learnt quite a bit about the GSV-R. The bike has worked really well here from the beginning and although we made a few modifications we are really pleased with where we are at the moment.´

Loris Capirossi - 11th

`I struggled a bit too much with the bike today and I never found a good set-up, but we have a good setting in the team already because Chris went much better than me and we will look at his data and see if it can help us tomorrow. We still need to get some more control out of the bike and we will try a couple of different things on Saturday. I am quite happy with the performance of the tyres, so we just need to sort out a couple of other things and I´m sure we´ll be up with the front guys. We have to keep working hard and I need to improve a lot in sections three and four as I´m really slow through there, but I know what is needed and I will be going for it tomorrow!´