Rizla Suzuki’s Loris Capirossi got of to a positive start for his home grand prix this weekend at the Misano Circuit. The experienced Italian spent most of Free Practice 1 setting up both his GSX-R machines, and using them to compare the hard and soft tyres that Bridgestone have bought with them for this weekend. Capirossi finished the session in 10th and will be hoping to impress, not only in front of his home crowd, but also on his 200th MotoGP start.
Speaking after the session, Capirossi was upbeat about his chances. “It has been a long time since we have had a Friday like that. I am not happy about the position, but I am very happy with the bike today. We did a really good job with the bike and didn't have to make too many changes from the original setting, but what we did change also seemed to work well. The base settings for the electronics was also better today, it's not perfect and we still need to do a bit more work on it, but for now it is fine. I am happy for the whole team because it has been a much better day and we hope that we can keep this up for the whole weekend. We need decent weather on Saturday and Sunday and if we get that I am sure we can have a good weekend.”
Ãlvaro Bautista had a terrible day compared to his teammate. The young Spaniard finished in 17th after having real issues trying to generate any rear grip. All was not lost though as Bautista did manage to work on race setup during the session.
“It has not been a good practice for me because I have had a problem entering the corner as I didn't have a lot of rear grip and I cannot enter as quickly as I want to.” said Bautista “I started with the harder compound rear tyre, but on the second run I used the softer option, because with the harder one it was almost impossible to get any grip. We tried to do some changes in practice, but the improvements were not that big, so we will need to work on the data for the rest of the day to find a solution to that and hope we can work it out for tomorrow.”
