Decent start for Bautista at team’s home GP

Rizla Suzuki has completed the first day of practice at the British Grand Prix with Álvaro Bautista and Loris Capirossi taking their time to become accustomed to the new circuit at Silverstone.

Bautista (P13, 2’08.666, 19 laps) was certainly more comfortable on his Suzuki GSV-R today than at Mugello recently, as he still battles back to full fitness from his recent injuries. He made steady progress throughout the session and was pleased with his first day’s effort, but realises that improvements still need to be made by both him and the bike as the weekend progresses.

Today’s practice was held in very overcast conditions with track temperatures only getting up to 21ºC, the fastest time of the day was set by Jorge Lorenzo on his factory Yamaha.
Rizla Suzuki has one more practice session tomorrow morning to get everything in place for the qualifying in the afternoon. Sunday’s 20-lap race is round five on the calendar and the main event gets underway at 13.00hrs local time (12.00hrs GMT).

Álvaro Bautista:
“It has been a good experience today, because when we came here earlier in the year and did some laps on a road-bike it was totally different to riding the GSV-R here today. It was like riding a totally different track – mainly because the corners now feel closer together due to the power of the GSV-R. My shoulder is better, but still not 100%. It is stronger than Mugello and now I can start to work a lot more normally on the bike than I did there. We need to do some work on the exit of the corners because we’re getting a lot of movement and that is pushing me wide and making it difficult to get on the gas. Tomorrow we must find a solution for this and make sure we improve on today.”

Paul Denning – Team Manager:
“This was not really the start we wanted for the team’s home Grand Prix and especially for Loris it was difficult to find any rhythm, given that the bike just didn’t work well out of the box. Clearly everyone will go quicker as the track improves and the riders’ knowledge and confidence also improves, but we’ve got bigger steps to make than most and we’ll have to hope that the direction changes we make overnight will allow the riders to push much harder tomorrow morning and get much closer to the leading group.”

Source: Rizla Suzuki MotoGP