Bautista pleased with strong start at Brno and looking for more
Rizla Suzuki’s twin attack of Álvaro Bautista and John Hopkins got off to an impressive start in the Czech Republic today, with both riders inside the top-10.
Bautista completed 32 laps of the 5,403m Brno circuit to record a best time of 1’57.857 and eighth place on the leader-board. Bautista was regularly in touch with the top six throughout both of today’s practices and is confident that with a few more adjustments to his GSV-R tomorrow he can make further steps forward.
Today’s sessions were both held in bright and sunny conditions with track temperatures reaching 32ºC. Honda’s Dani Pedrosa set the fastest time of the day, with current championship leader Casey Stoner second.
The Rizla Suzuki duo will have one more free practice session tomorrow morning, before an hour of qualifying in the afternoon will determine grid positions for Sunday’s race. The 11th round of the 2011 MotoGP World Championship gets underway at 14.00hrs local time (12.00hrs GMT) on Sunday 14th August.
Álvaro Bautista: “Today was my first full MotoGP day at Brno when fully fit, so I am pleased to have done that. Last year I crashed in the second free practice and the rest of the weekend was quite hard for me. The first thing today was to get a good feeling with the bike, but this morning I felt the bike slide a bit in the corners, this might have been because the track was a bit dirty, but we made a change that also helped to improve the problem. I can do a long run with used tyres and after 26 laps my rhythm was good and I could do low 58s. We then put in a new front and rear tyre and I was able to push a bit more, but I found some traffic on the last laps and I couldn’t improve my time. I am happy with today because I have done the fastest lap I’ve ever done at Brno, my previous best was 59.1 and today I did 57.8 so that is a good improvement. I have a good feeling with the bike and I’m sure we can improve the rhythm and the lap-time, so on Saturday we will work on a couple of things to do that. I am really looking forward to tomorrow because I think we can make a good position in qualifying to get a good start in Sunday’s race.”
Source: Rizla Suzuki MotoGP