With the 2005 British Superbike season fast approaching
Crash.net caught up with Rizla Suzuki’s newest signing Scott Smart to see how things were taking shape for the new challenge.
“I’m just despirate for it to be February now!” enthused Scott. “Obviously all the tracks are cold and damp and horrible over here now so there isn’t going to be any testing going on, there is the new bike to be built and the guys are going to need a couple of months to get that done and all I’m going to be doing is going stir crazy wishing I was actually riding now!”
The 2005 Suzuki GSX-R1000 is nearly an all new bike, with major changes taking place in the chassis department. As with any new bike there is a certain amount of testing that needs to be done to get it prepared as a race winning machine, which for the Suzuki has started already.
“The testing is already going on in Asia,” commented Scott. “Mat Mladin (AMA Suzuki Superbike rider) has already been out there riding the bike and apparently it’s pretty good already.”
However Rizla are not the only team who will be competing on the new Suzuki, with two other substantial teams taking on the machine with the aid of the Japanse factory.
“There are going to be three teams that are all very well connected running the bikes, where last year with the Kawasaki we were pretty much on our own. With the Suzuki we’ve got the AMA team with Mat Mladin on it, we’ve got the World Superbike team (Alstare Suzuki) with Yukio Kagayama and
Troy Corser so there is a good connection with our team there (Yukio Kagayama spent the last two years with Rizla in BSB) and obviously our team.
"So the three teams are going to work very much together to get the bikes right, because we are not competing against each other so we need to help each other."
However there is an even greater connection for the Rizla team with Suzuki as the owner and former direct manager of the BSB team Paul Denning has been asked by the Japanese factory to head up its
MotoGP effort.
