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

Perfect weather for racing greeted the MotoGP riders for the first practice today. But the practice results make the session look a little different than usual. At the front we have Dani Pedrosa as the fastest man today, dominating the entire practice session and leading the rest of the field comfortably by a huge margin, nobody came even close to his laptimes. The gap to 5th fastest Colin Edwards is already over a second and generally the field is pretty stretched out.
And on the other end of the timesheets Alvaro’s been the slowest rider today, supposedly having some big setting issues as he still was around 6 seconds off the pace after half of the session. At the end he managed to improve his laptimes significantly, but he still stayed last and is over 3 seconds slower than Pedrosa at the front. Alvaro and his team will have a lot of sorting out to do tonight and in the second practice tomorrow.

Pos. Rider Team Time Gap 1st/Prev.
1 Dani PEDROSA Repsol Honda Team 1’34.772
2 Andrea DOVIZIOSO Repsol Honda Team 1’35.384 0.612 / 0.612
3 Jorge LORENZO Fiat Yamaha Team 1’35.444 0.672 / 0.060
4 Valentino ROSSI Fiat Yamaha Team 1’35.539 0.767 / 0.095
5 Colin EDWARDS Monster Yamaha Tech 3 1’35.834 1.062 / 0.295
6 Ben SPIES Monster Yamaha Tech 3 1’35.892 1.120 / 0.058
7 Nicky HAYDEN Ducati Team 1’36.028 1.256 / 0.136
8 Casey STONER Ducati Team 1’36.072 1.300 / 0.044
9 Marco MELANDRI San Carlo Honda Gresini 1’36.126 1.354 / 0.054
10 Loris CAPIROSSI Rizla Suzuki MotoGP 1’36.277 1.505 / 0.151
11 Hector BARBERA Paginas Amarillas Aspar 1’36.293 1.521 / 0.016
12 Randy DE PUNIET LCR Honda MotoGP 1’36.454 1.682 / 0.161
13 Marco SIMONCELLI San Carlo Honda Gresini 1’36.533 1.761 / 0.079
14 Aleix ESPARGARO Pramac Racing Team 1’36.716 1.944 / 0.183
15 Hiroshi AOYAMA Interwetten Honda MotoGP 1’37.001 2.229 / 0.285
16 Mika KALLIO Pramac Racing Team 1’37.697 2.925 / 0.696
17 Alvaro BAUTISTA Rizla Suzuki MotoGP 1’37.900 3.128 / 0.203