Weekend starts positively for Suzuki colleagues

Keen to cash in on the winter improvements made to their GSV-R bike by Suzuki in Japan, Chris Vermeulen and Loris Capirossi are on the hunt for big points this weekend at Motegi.

Vermeulen’s seventh place in Qatar and Capirossi’s DNF after he crashed out in the desert were not the results either rider was looking for, but having started the Polini Grand Prix of Japan weekend both inside the first free practice top six things are looking better for the Rizla Suzuki team-mates.

Having finished fourth on the timesheets, albeit 0.837s down on pace-setter Valentino Rossi at a track where Suzuki have not enjoyed great results in recent times, Vermeulen told motogp.com, “It wasn’t too bad, we are a lot closer to the pace than we have been here in the past. The forecast for Saturday is rain so it was very important to try and get as much done and be as quick as we could in the first session, because this might be our only dry session.”

“Suzuki have done some good things with the bike. The important thing with Motegi is accelerating off the corners onto those long straights and the bike seems to be a bit better at that so things are looking better than they have done before.”

The Australian’s experience Italian team-mate was not far behind in sixth place on Friday, but he knows there is still plenty of work to do given his 1.435s gap to Rossi. Capirossi stated afterwards, “We need more time to get the bike just right. It is working quite well but we still have a bit of work to do on the setting. The conditions didn’t help today because it was very cold and we couldn’t get the tyres up to temperature. We used one set of tyres for the whole session and the left side still looks like new!”

“We will see how things turn out tomorrow, but there is a forecast of rain and then it might be fine for the race, so we will just have to see what happens.”