Alex Lowes says the Voltcom Crescent Suzuki team are making steady progress despite another tough day with the GSX-R1000 at Assen on Friday. The team ran the spec Magneti Marelli ECU for the first time at Aragon last weekend, with their running dogged by problems, but Lowes already feels Suzuki are starting to get to grips with the software and has praised their efforts to do so.
“Another difficult day. We’ve made some steps in the right direction but it will be interesting to see if we can improve further tomorrow. I’m still not 100% confident with the bike but I’m hoping once we gain that confidence we can find the consistency and pace that we need. The lads are doing a good job and we are all doing our best to find a solution, I really appreciate the hard work so once we’ve slept on it tonight we can come back fresh and ready to tackle it head-on tomorrow.”
Lowes was seventh fastest, nine places ahead of teammate Randy de Puniet and the Frenchman admitted his side of the garage made a mistake with their choice of set-up in second practice.
“It was not an easy day overall. This morning was looking ok but when we decided to improve the traction control this afternoon it was in the wrong direction. We tried a number of things but in the end there was no improvement so we finished both sessions without a decent traction control setting. We also tried a new tyre at the end of the afternoon but the feeling wasn’t good, I thought I needed more time to warm the tyre but I’m not sure so we finished the session in 16th which is not where I was expecting to be after running 11th this morning. I am really hoping to be in the top-10 so we need to work hard tonight to find a solution and improve the GSX-R further. Now is not the time to lose motivation so we need to continue to focus and come back fighting for a good grid-place tomorrow.”
