Rizla Suzuki racers Loris Capirossi and Álvaro Bautista will start tomorrow’s Indianapolis Grand Prix alongside each other on the fourth row of the grid.
Capirossi (P10, 1’41.512, 25 laps) will begin tomorrow’s 28 lap race from the front of row four, with team-mate Bautista (P11, 1’4.534, 29 laps) next to him. The pair both made steps to improve their respective Suzuki GSV-Rs around the 4,216m American circuit and they are confident that these measures will help them in tomorrow’s race. Capirossi is still looking to unlock some more of the potential of his GSV-R and will probably make a couple of changes in tomorrow’s warm-up ahead of the race, whilst Bautista made big advances with learning the circuit on a MotoGP machine and is confident that he can improve even more during the race.
Today’s qualifying was held in warm and sunny conditions with track temperatures again over 50ºC. Ben Spies took his first ever MotoGP pole position, as he rode his satellite Yamaha to the front of the grid ahead of World Championship leader Jorge Lorenzo in second.
Tomorrow’s event is the 11th race of the season and the action gets underway at 15.00hrs local time (19.00hrs GMT).
Loris Capirossi:
“We saw a little bit more promise in the qualifying; it was like the sun started to shine on us. We had struggled a bit in practice and we tried to fix things and improve the feeling and it seemed like we have started to do that. We are still struggling a bit with front feeling, but the whole team has worked really hard to fix this and we are pretty close to a solution now. My bike is not very good on top-speed here and we don’t know why, we have compared the data from last year and we are a bit slower so we will have to try and do something about that. I am quite happy with this afternoon because we improved a lot from this morning and yesterday. The rhythm we have is not too bad and if we can do the same in the race I think we should be ok. I am positive for the race and will start will full throttle – I’m just going to go for it.”
Álvaro Bautista:
“We had a good qualifying and I was able to follow a pack that included Rossi, Dovizioso and Pedrosa and I didn’t lose too much time to them on every lap, so that was good for me as I needed to get an idea of how I was doing in comparison to other riders around here. After that I tried to push myself a bit more, but I still had a bit of a problem with rear grip and it made things a bit hard. We made some small changes to the bike and improved things quite a bit. At the end I tried to follow someone to get more reference points because they are so important here, but there was nobody to follow so I had to work alone and set my times by myself. I think our set-up for the race is not too bad and if I get a good start tomorrow and get into the group in front I can stay with them.”
Stuart Shenton – Loris Capirossi’s Crew Chief:
“It was not a bad qualifying, especially considering we had a couple of issues in the two practice sessions. Loris was a lot happier with the bike this afternoon, but it does seem to be tough for us to get in the top-10 in qualifying and we’ve just managed to scrape in there today. We still might make a couple of little changes in the warm-up tomorrow and then we’ll be looking for Loris to get a good start and see if he can move a couple of places forward and be battling well inside the top-10.”
Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix Qualifying Practice Classification:
1. Ben Spies (Yamaha) 1’40.105: 2. Jorge Lorenzo (Yamaha) +0.220: 3. Nicky Hayden (Ducati) +0.231: 4. Andrea Dovizioso (Honda) +0.454: 5. Dani Pedrosa (Honda) +0.532: 10. LORIS CAPIROSSI (RIZLA SUZUKI MOTOGP) +1.407: 11. ÁLVARO BAUTISTA (RIZLA SUZUKI MOTOGP) +1.429:
