Team Suzuki Press Office – November 15.
Andrea Iannone – 7th.
Alex Rins – 21st.
The 2017 MotoGP™ season kicked-off today at the Ricardo Tormo circuit in Valencia, Spain with the first test of the season held right after the season finale at the Spanish circuit.
Team SUZUKI ECSTAR revealed their new riders Andrea Iannone and Alex Rins, who joined the crew to have a first taste of the Suzuki GSX-RRs. The main purpose of the opening day of the two-day official test allowed the riders to get their first feelings with their machines, starting from actual set-up as a base to start working on for the future.
Today started slowly, with a very cold temperature at the track and the need to understand the new bikes before starting to push for real. Under these conditions, Iannone took advantage of his experience and after a first run of adaptation he could start to apply some modifications in the set-up and electronic configuration, progressively improving his performance. He incurred a crash in middle of the afternoon, without any injury, during this process of improvement and he still remained in the top-part of the timing sheets for the whole day, ending in seventh position.
MotoGP™ Rookie Rins had to start feeling the Factory GSX-RR’s behaviour without electronic controls, and then to start using them to understand how they change the potential riding characteristics and today has been a step-by-step approach, allowing him to take all the time he needed to get acquainted with the bike.