Team Suzuki Ecstar Heads to Phillip Island
Team Suzuki Press Office – October 14.
The fast and smooth circuit of Phillip Island awaits Team SUZUKI ECSTAR for the second race of the Pacific leg of the 2015 MotoGP™ Championship this weekend.
Both Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Viñales are eager to get back riding as soon as possible, even though both have a different motivation: Espargaro has an improved feeling after the last series of races – although in Japan he couldn’t finalise a positive race result – and has found more-and-more confidence with his GSX-RR. This allowed him to enjoy the previous race weekends and also be competitive in the wet, giving him confidence for the final rush towards the final round in Valencia in Spain.
Viñales instead has encountered some difficulties in finding a proper feeling with his bike in recent races, but last weekend in Japan, despite a crash, he finally found a good way to finalise his machine set-up and get back a positive feeling, being competitive in wet conditions and he is now eager to ride and improve again.
The Phillip Island Circuit is a 4.4 km (2.76 miles) track at the very south of Australia, with breathtaking scenery and beautiful ocean views. It is made up of seven left-hand and five right-hand corners and is one of the fastest, most fluid tracks on the calendar, providing some of the most spectacular racing in the MotoGP™ season. Sunday’s MotoGP™ GP will be raced over 27 laps over a total distance of 120.1 km (74.5 miles)
Aleix Espargaro:
“Even though in Japan the final result didn’t satisfy me I am happy that we found a good set-up and I’m getting my confidence back on my GSX-RR. We have passed through a few hard races in the middle of the season but we kept our concentration and finally found a proper way to improve. This is part of the learning process; we knew this would happen this year. However the most important thing is to get the feeling back and be able to exploit what we have at its best. Moreover we knew that Motegi wouldn’t be easy for us, being a stop-and-go track, and I’m very happy to go to Phillip Island which is almost the complete opposite; fast, smooth and fluid. These are better conditions to exploit the strengths of our machine. It is also good to race right after the last weekend, so we can keep concentration and motivation at their uppermost.”
Maverick Viñales:
“I came away from Japan being aware that even though it was not a positive weekend in terms of the final result it was, in fact, one of improvement. We did a very positive job throughout all the weekend, improving the feeling session-after-session. On Friday I had so many troubles trying to be fast but then on Saturday I could rely on a more effective set-up and finally entered Q2 and finalising a good balance on the bike for the race. If it wasn’t for a little electronic issue we had in the race I think I could have scored a very positive result, despite being aware that Motegi was not suitable for our machine’s characteristics. That’s not the situation for Phillip Island; the circuit is much faster and smoother, which is good for our GSX-RR and also for my riding style. Lately I’m struggling to find good confidence at the beginning of the weekend and it is important to be able to be competitive from Friday. We need to work in order to get back to what we had in middle of the season when we found a good working method that allowed me to be much more confident. I know we can do that, we have already proved that, therefore we will apply ourselves in this direction, keeping calm and being aware of our potential.”
