New Rizla Suzuki MotoGP signing Alvaro Bautista acquitted himself well at the 5,548m Sepang International Circuit during his first visit on an 800cc Grand Prix bike. He completed 88 laps during the two days and recorded a quickest time of 203.274. Bautista got into a good rhythm throughout the test and made many changes to his GSV-R to get the set-up right for his riding style, whilst improving steadily on his lap-time.
Alvaro – and teammate Loris Capirossi – will now both head off to Suzukis headquarters in Hamamatsu, Japan before returning to Sepang for the second test later this month. The two will be in race action at the first event of the year at Losail in Qatar on Sunday 11th April.
Here’s key quotes from Alvaro and Team Manager Paul Denning…
Alvaro Bautista:
“It was a good test and I managed to learn a lot. This was my first time here on the MotoGP bike after a long time without riding, and it was amazing how much faster everything seemed to happen compared to the 250! Day one just felt like starting all over again! I made steps with my speed and it was a shame we lost some practice this morning due to the rain, but even with this the team improved the feeling of the bike a lot and now I think I can start to push more.
I am now looking forward to the next test and we certainly have a good base, and I feel ready to work when we get back to Sepang later this month.”
Paul Denning, Team Manager:
“This has been a good shake-down test and has answered some questions for us, but we still need to find the correct solutions in one or two areas. The engineers will take the information back to Japan and the race department guys will be working flat out to find the necessary improvements for the next two tests. At the moment, I have to really thank Loris because we rely on him to give us the direction, and this means he has a really detailed workload! Its tough for him because he knows he can go so much quicker when the base is fixed, but he also knows that we have to improve the bike a lot to avoid the same problems as 2009. We would rather leave Sepang a bit further down the order than 2009 but have a better race bike come the first GP!
Alvaro is working well, riding within himself and learning everything step by step. His riding style changed a little over the 2 days and hes gradually becoming a MotoGP rider! At the moment he is doing everything we are asking of him, he improved steadily over the test and we are convinced that we will start to see big steps when he gets into the full rhythm of riding a MotoGP bike. Overall we are quite positive after this first test, but we all still know there is a lot more to do to achieve our targets.”
