The Rizla Suzuki team will start the Indianapolis Grand Prix side by side on the grid after a strong performance in qualifying saw Loris Capirossi qualify in 10th place with Ãlvaro Bautista 0.02s behind him in 11th. The pair used the majority of the session to tune their individual race set-ups, and both feel that there is more to get from the factory GSV-R, with Capirossi looking to make final tweeks in FP3 and Bautista looking to continue his learning curve on both the bike, and the circuit.
Speaking after the session, Capirossi is confident for the race. “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.”
Bautista was also in an upbeat mood after qualifying “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.”
