Rizla Suzuki's
John Hopkins could barely contain his excitement after putting a primitive version of the 2007 Suzuki 800 within 0.04secs of the fastest 800cc machine during testing at Valencia on Wednesday.
Hopkins and team-mate
Chris Vermeulen were riding with the new 800cc engine inside the 'old' 990cc chassis – but both lapped comfortably faster than their best times from Sunday's Valencian Grand Prix season finale, despite never having ridden the 800 machine before.
"I gotta admit I'm very happy with the day!" smiled Hopper after his 29 laps. "Right out of the box we were able to get into our race-lap times that we did on the 990cc bike. We have some basic problems which you always get with a new bike, such as engine mapping. We still need a bit more acceleration and some fine tuning, but for a new machine this is the best position we have ever been in since I've been at Suzuki! Like I said I'm very happy and we have a lot more things to test over the winter, but how it stands at the moment I am expecting big things to happen with this machine!"
Vermeulen lapped just 0.04secs slower than Hopkins and confirmed the highly promising debut.
"Our test riders have obviously done a lot of miles on it already and the whole test team and Suzuki have done a great job - the bike was good to start with," confirmed Chris. "We made some modifications to suit the Valencia circuit and we were able to do lap-times consistently close to the ones we did over the weekend. It is very promising for the first ride and even more so when you consider it's an 800 engine bolted into our 990 chassis. I am quite happy for the first test and there is a long way to go to the first race. It all looks very promising and if we can start like this we certainly have a goal to aim at."
Suzuki has a major development programme for the chassis, bodywork and all major components of the 800 over the winter. This includes testing a completely new prototype chassis, which test rider Nobuatsu Aoki will debut today (Thursday) at Valencia.
