Bautista struggles with rear grip in first practice session

Álvaro Bautista (P17, 1’37.900, 27 laps) had quite a contrasting day compared to his team-mate Loris Capirossi who finished the first practice at Misano in 10th position. Bautista struggled to generate the rear grip from his GSV-R as he tried to come to terms with the Misano circuit. He made small steps with the set-up of his bike through the session, but will be looking to make marked improvements tomorrow as he continues to prepare for Sunday’s race.

Today’s practice was held in warm and sunny conditions with air temperatures reaching 25ºC and track temperatures getting up to 37ºC. Spaniard Dani Pedrosa on his factory Honda recorded the fastest time of the day.

Rizla Suzuki has one more practice session tomorrow morning to prepare for the qualifying session in the afternoon and Sunday’s 28-lap race. The 12th round of the season gets underway at 14.00hrs local time (12.00hrs GMT) on Sunday 5th September.

Álvaro Bautista:
“It has not been a good practice for me because I have had a problem entering the corner as I didn’t have a lot of rear grip and I cannot enter as quickly as I want to. I started with the harder compound rear tyre, but on the second run I used the softer option, because with the harder one it was almost impossible to get any grip. We tried to do some changes in practice, but the improvements were not that big, so we will need to work on the data for the rest of the day to find a solution to that and hope we can work it out for tomorrow.”

Source: Rizla Suzuki MotoGP