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[Stoner27]

Biaggi admet qu'il a encore du pain sur la planche!

Despite setting the second fastest time of this week's three-day Qatar test, Team Alstare Suzuki Corona Extra's Max Biaggi insists that the squad still has some way to go before he will consider it a consistent frontrunner.

The Italian, who had bested the previous test in Spain, posted the second fastest time of the Losail session to sit behind a dominant Troy Bayliss, but admitted that he had had to fit soft rubber to his new 2007-model GSX-R1000 K7 to push the machine up the order in the Pirelli development test.

"I think that this track is really difficult for us and the conditions on day one didn't help us much," he reported, "The track felt a bit slippery - probably because of the sand - and I didn't want to push too hard too soon and crash. When the conditions improved, I was able to start to understand the feeling of the bike, but it definitely didn't feel as good initially as it did during our last test in Valencia and we soon realised that we had a lot of work to do - probably more than the others here.


"Like everybody else, I set my best lap time on a soft tyre - one that would not be able to last a complete race - but it was good to finish with the second best lap. I am happy with how the team is working and am confident that they will be working just as hard on the build-up to the next test. Suddenly, the first race seems not so far away, so I hope our next tests will solve some of our current problems."

The new machine that Biaggi and team-mate Yukio Kagayama used at Losail is very different in feel to the 2006 bike, and both riders worked hard at understanding and developing the bike instead of chasing lap times. Biaggi left it until his last lap before posting his best time, while Kagayama took eighth quickest time due to a mistake in tyre choice.

"For all of us, the bike is still new and we have to work on the stability of it, as well as the characteristics of the engine," the Italian confirmed, "At the moment, the engine doesn't feel so smooth and that makes it difficult entering and exiting the corners. That, together with the behaviour of the chassis, means that I cannot get the bike to drive as smoothly as I would like."

Kagayama admitted that, despite lagging behind his team-mate on the timesheets, he was satisfied with the way the three days had gone.

"I would have liked to have ended these tests with a faster lap time, but I am not too disappointed because we managed to do a lot of good work on the new K7," he said, "I think maybe our tyre choice was not so good when I was trying to do my best lap and I ended up lower than I had wanted.

"We worked a lot on the chassis during these tests and, at the end, I felt that the bike was more comfortable and enjoyable to ride. We also worked on the behaviour of the engine and how to make the feeling smoother. I think that there are improvements still to come in both these areas. The bike feels quite different to the 2006 model and Max, I and the whole team have to understand what is going on before we can make the changes required.

"However, we have only two tests before the first race and I hope, by then, the bike will be ready. A lot will depend on what we find in the next tests, but my feeling is quite positive."

source: crash.net