Corser: It's been a long time coming.

Troy Corser won the first race of the 2005 World Superbike season at Qatar this morning, in an impressive one-two with his Alstare Suzuki team-mate Yukio Kagayama.

"Yeah I'm wrapped! It's been a long time coming," commented Corser to Crash.net after the race. "It's been a long frustrating three years knowing I had it in me to win if I had a competitive bike. Now I'm on a competitive machine with the 1000cc four-cylinder Suzuki that does everything I want it to do and I've just got to make it work."

Corser won the first race on aggregated time after the race was stopped due to a sudden downpour that made track conditions treacherous for the slick tyre-shod machines.

"For the first stage of the race everything felt great and I felt comfortable and just slowly pulled away. I was consistently 0.3-0.5secs quicker.

"It was raining for the last four laps before the red flags came out, but it wasn't that bad to actually stop the race. I didn't want to stop the race and have a two-part if I didn't have to, but it was time to stop at that point as someone was going to end up crashing for sure.

"I'm a bit disappointed with the second stage of the race. Didn't get that good of a start as the clutch wasn't so good after the first start, I didn't want to burn it out and risk not being able to finish at all.

"I didn't get such a good position for the first couple of laps but pushed hard and made sure I didn't get to far behind and did what I had to do to finish the race," he concluded.