Strange start to the weekend for Bautista with delayed practice
Rizla Suzuki finally began this weekend’s preparations for the Australian Grand Prix at a later than scheduled time due to the heavy rain and strong winds that caused a delay in proceedings.
Álvaro Bautista (P14, 1’46.160, 24 laps) produced a strong performance in the very wet conditions and was consistently inside the top-10 – an impressive feat considering the Spaniard had never ridden at Phillip Island on a MotoGP bike and has very limited wet weather experience on an 800cc machine.
With cold winds, coupled with the rain, the track temperatures only reached 10°C exactly the same as the air temperatures. Newly crowned World Champion Jorge Lorenzo produced the quickest time of the day.
Rizla Suzuki has one more free practice session tomorrow morning, followed by qualifying in the afternoon. With heavy rain also forecast for tomorrow, any piece of dry practice could be valuable as Sunday’s 27-lap race is expected to be held in the best conditions of the weekend.
Álvaro Bautista: “It’s been a strange day today, because we have practiced two hours later than usual, so this has made the start to the weekend very different. At the beginning it was very wet and I just tried to get as many kilometres as possible in those conditions, because so far this year I’ve only ridden in the wet twice. I didn’t have a feeling of much contact with the track at the start of the session – it was like I was floating – so I went into the garage and made some changes, but when I exited again the track was starting to dry and this made it very difficult because some parts were very wet and others dry. This was a shame because we couldn’t tell if the modifications we made were better or not. It was good to have the opportunity to ride here in the wet and we’ll have to see what tomorrow brings. If it rains then we need to decide whether we keep working in the direction we were going today, or if it’s dry then we just have to start from the beginning.”
Source: Rizla Suzuki MotoGP
