Team SUZUKI ECSTAR concluded a positive day of testing in Jerez de la Frontera in Spain yesterday; the team’s final testing until 2017 with factory riders.

Following last week’s test session in Valencia, the team travelled to the Andalusian circuit with new factory rider Andrea Iannone and Team Suzuki Test Rider Takuya Tsuda, who substituted for Alex Rins, who is still recovering after the injury he suffered during last week’s crash.

The cold temperature of Jerez didn’t allow the riders to push to their limit, but the main objective of the test was not to chase the time attack but to test many things that were useful to determine the development over the winter. In particular, the focus was on different specs of the engine in order to find the best direction according to the riders’ needs.

Iannone made impressive work on this, giving the engineers important information to work on, while Tsuda focused more in testing different settings in electronics and collecting a lot of data.

Thanks to the positive work done today the full testing program for Iannone was already completed, so he will not ride any more before the first official testing of 2017 at the end of January in Sepang. The Team will stay in Jerez for more testing with Tsuda.

Davide Brivio – Team Manager:

“We achieved a good result in making the whole testing program in only one day with Iannone. After having lost the concessions we want to save testing days for the future and having completed all the tests we needed we won’t have him ride more. Our purpose here was not the chase to the fastest lap but to allow him to improve his feeling with the machine and help us to determine the future development. We brought here some different specs of the engine that he tried, and he gave us the direction to take in the winter. We will not develop a brand new engine for 2017, we will develop an evolution of the actual engine and Andrea gave us the feedback we needed to understand which character of the engine to develop, according to his experience and needs. He did a great job today, very intense until the very end of the available track time, and we must thank him for this contribution.

“We have here our test rider Tsuda, who is focusing more in collecting information for the electronics development. We are trying to find a better efficiency in our settings and we will continue this work with him also tomorrow. The objective of course is to gain experience and find more options.

“Alex Rins could not join us in this test because of the injury he suffered in Valencia last week. We are very happy to know that he is getting better and better, his recovery path is proceeding well. He is now at home and enjoying some rest, he will need three-to-four weeks but in a few days he will already start some work in the gym. Of course he cannot put any effort in the back, but he will be able to start with some light work. It’s a pity he couldn't attend this test because he needed some mileage with the GSX-RR to get used to it, but we’re happy that his recovery is going well. We are all eager to see him again in Sepang, where we believe he will be fully fit.”