Team Suzuki Press Office – September 9.
Maverick Viñales – 10th
Aleix Espargaró – 11th
Team SUZUKI ECSTAR had a positive first day at the World Misano Circuit Marco Simoncelli in Italy today for the first two practice sessions of the weekend, consistently-improving their feeling and confidence; although the classification-position still needs to be improved tomorrow.
Maverick Viñales settled his GSX-RR in the top-three for many laps in the morning, focusing his job on the finalisation of a base set-up for the pace. His position in the classification could be have better though, but some of his best laps had been ruled-out for alleged course-cutting infringements, pushing him down the leaderboard from a potential top-three overall: It was a matter of inches in exiting corner 13 that the new rule applied - and which all riders will be called to adapt-to quickly this weekend and for the rest of the season.
Team-mate Aleix Espargaró also had a positive first day with many improvements and a renewed competitiveness. He sits right behind Viñales in the classification but his potential for the ‘time attack’ is still to be exploited.
Davide Brivio – Team Manager:
“The final classification doesn’t show how positive our day was. With race configuration we did a good performance and with both riders we developed a good base set-up. Tomorrow we will work on all information we gathered today, and finalise the best package, but we are pretty happy with the job we’ve done.