Suzuki riders licking wounds after Sachsenring battles

Weekend crashes for Loris Capirossi and Chris Vermeulen meant that the Sunday race in Germanyw as always going to be tough for Rizla Suzuki. Sure enough, the Italian-Australian pairing were unable to breach the top ten after a host of problems, the principal of which was the after-effects of their big Free Practice hits. Capirossi eventually came home eleventh, with Vermeulen salvaging thirteenth.

Loris Capirossi -11th

"We had a couple of issues during the warm-up today and when we saw that the weather was likely to be a bit better this afternoon we decided to use a harder compound tyre. Unfortunately we never had a chance to test this tyre during the practice and it was difficult to get the rubber up to temperature. This was one of the reasons that I struggled during the race, but there was also something else that wasn't quite right and we need to understand why we did so badly here. This weekend has now finished and we could do with doing some work on this track to see where we are going wrong, but that is not possible. This is not good enough for us and we don't want to be performing like this and we need as much help as we can get to improve things. The whole crew did a great job last night to rebuild the bike after I destroyed it yesterday, and my condition from that crash is not great but the biggest problem I had today was lack of feeling. I wasn't able to turn as well as I wanted and this is a problem for me. I really hope that we can find some solutions and analyse the data from today and try and do our best at Donington next week."

Chris Vermeulen - 13th

"It has been a difficult weekend, especially after I didn't get off to the best of starts by crashing in the first practice session. I gave my body a really hard time this weekend and because of the crash - and my condition - we lost some track-time and important set-up time. The team did give me a decent bike today, even with the lack of information that we had. I got a good start to the race and I had reasonable speed in the first couple of laps, but I struggled for braking performance and a lot of guys went past me. Then I ran off after I made a mistake and went wide in turn one and that cost me a lot of time. After that is was a pretty boring race and I was just trying to catch Canepa in front of me, but I just didn't quite have the speed to do that. I did get Kallio on the last lap though and managed to get some points from not a good weekend. Hopefully I can get fitter over the next few days and push hard at Donington."