Vermeulen thanks team after taking sixth place

That a sixth place result in the penultimate race of the season matches Chris Vermeulen’s second best result of 2009 so far speaks for itself in terms of the difficult time he has had this year, but the departing Rizla Suzuki man was pleased to have produced a competitive display in Malaysia on Sunday.

Although the likeable Australian is heading off from MotoGP to pastures new at the end of the current campaign he wants to return to the World Championship in the future, and the 10 valuable points he gained at Sepang mean he has every chance of a good final standings result after Valencia in two weeks time.

Vermeulen is involved in a close five-rider fight with Marco Melandri, Loris Capirossi, Alex de Angelis and Toni Elías for seventh place overall, and he outperformed all of them on Sunday to give himself a confidence boosting result.

“I got a good start, but in turn one there was a lot going on and I got pushed around a little bit, but I came out of it ok and was able to get my head down straight away,” Vermeulen commented as he reviewed the wet race at Sepang. “For the first four or five laps I really struggled to get a feeling in the tyres, especially on the left-hand-side, but once I got that working and into a rhythm I felt quite good. The bike worked well up until the last few laps - when the track started to dry out - and then it was very difficult through the corners, but I'm sure it wasn't easy for anyone out there.”

Noting the hard graft put in by his mechanics at round 16, he added, “I think we had the speed for a top five and my guys did a great job with the motorbike to be able to give me something competitive when we hadn't done any wet testing here at all.”