MotoGP: Suzuki Ends Austin Test

Paul Carruthers | April 18, 2014

Randy de Puniet tested the Suzuki MotoGP bike at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin Texas.

The Suzuki MotoGP test team finished its test at the Circuit of the Americas yesterday with Randy de Puniet lapping at a best of 2:05.85 after 62 laps of the 3.29-mile track on the outskirts of Austin, Texas.

Marc Marquez’s best lap in Sunday’s Red Bull Grand Prix of the Americas was a 2:03.575. If de Puniet was racing in the Grand Prix and lapped at a best of 2:05.85 he would have turned in the 13th fastest lap.

“I’m happy that we have found a big improvement on throttle connection and traction control,” de Puniet said in a team release. “We worked some time to find the right setting with the new electronics also and at the end we found a good compromise. We continued to work on the chosen chassis and it worked really well today. So the package is definitely better and I wanted to have an extra day to be able to continue the work as yesterday we spent most of the time setting-up the bike for the new circuit along with the new electronics. Also, I have not been riding a bike for a few weeks and I needed to get back the feeling.

“Anyway, today on the race tire, we improved a lot from yesterday’s lap times and found a good pace. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try some sort-of time-attack by the end of the day as we had a small problem on the bike and we lost the last half-hour on the track. But I feel we had the potential to even further improve our performance. Now we’ll go to Argentina – which is a completely new circuit – but I’m glad we will go there soon and hopefully I will be still hot from this test.”