Bautista achieves his best grid position at Misano

He secured eighth place, and finished a little frustrated because he felt he could have been even higher. Álvaro is doing wonders with this Suzuki and is getting stronger at every GP, and if he keeps up this progression we could see him near the podium in the upcoming races.

He set a lap time of 1:34.360 after completing 29 laps, 1.222 behind Stoner’s time. We know that although he struggles to get the rear tyre up to temperature, once it heats up he will be able to show all his worth on track.

Tomorrow over 28 laps, Bautista wants to fight with the riders ahead to beat his own previous best once again. In addition, Suzuki will unveil a new livery tomorrow called Rizla “Micron”. The design will be presented tomorrow morning before heading out to the race.

This is how Álvaro and his team director Paul Dennig explain it:

Álvaro Bautista (#19) (8th 1:34.360 +1.222)

In the morning we made changes to the gearbox, but before qualifying we went back to yesterday’s setup.

In qualifying I went out on the hard tyre, with lots of heat, to check how it performed. It wasn’t bad, I was running 1:35.0s consistently, but exiting a corner I applied a lot of throttle, spun, and went off track.

We switched to the medium compound that we had tried in the morning, and I have good feelings with it, I could manage 34s on mediums. In the end we couldn’t make the final lap because there were too many slow riders in the way and I lost my chance.

We have a good setup for tomorrow and we’ve improved our grid position, I think I can push. I want to be among the best for as long as possible and at least achieve the result from Indianapolis, or better.

Paul Denning (Rizla Suzuki MotoGP Team Director)

It’s strange that at Misano we’ve achieved our best qualifying of the year and in fact we’re somewhat disappointed. Álvaro has a consistent pace with 1:35s on the hard rear tyre and when we compared it with the medium tyre used in the morning, he immediately dropped to 1:34.3, which would have put him 4th.

With new tyres we expected – Álvaro included – that a 1:33 was possible, but between traffic and a couple of mistakes we let the opportunity slip away. We are still in the process of improving our qualifying; we have moved forward in this chapter, and it’s clear that the points come from the race. We are very eager to compete.