Suzuki camp react to difficult weekend

Australian rider Chris Vermeulen was unable to extend his strong Laguna Seca record on Sunday at the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix having suffered a heavy crash on Saturday and experienced difficulties with the set-up of his Suzuki GSV-R machine throughout the weekend.

Vermeulen came home in eighth place, from ninth on the grid, before telling motogp.com, “It was a little bit difficult, because I was sore from the crash I had on Saturday and that didn’t help things. To be honest we really struggled with the bike set-up to improve on what we had last year, even though our race time was quicker than last year, because everyone else has taken a bigger step forward. So it was tough for us.”

He continued, “I really struggled with the front tyre that Bridgestone had here, it was very different to last year. But that’s the single tyre supplier rule, it is the same for everyone and you’ve got to make your bike work around it. Anyway I got a pretty bad start, pretty bad couple of laps in which I got tangled up with (Colin) Edwards and (Loris) Capirossi and eventually came through for eighth. I felt our pace was probably good enough for sixth or seventh but it wasn’t as good as we needed to be at the front.”

After crashing out early in the race Loris Capirossi, meanwhile, was understandably disappointed with his second DNF of the year. The Italian commented, “I am really upset about this because we have worked so hard over weekend to find the best solution and we thought we would be ok with the setting. I started quite well and was really aggressive in the first couple of laps, but on turn six I lost the front on the second lap and then on the next lap I did the same in the same place, but that time I crashed.”

“The truth is this has been a terrible weekend for me as we never really found a good solution. Fortunately we have another nine races in front of us and we will keep working really hard to get some good results.”