There’s a very good chance that Suzuki will race its MotoGP bike as a wild card entry in the final round of this year’s MotoGP World Championship in Spain, team manager Davide Brivio said in an interview in the lead up to this weekend’s German Grand Prix at the Sachsenring.
The team is waiting final approval from management, but Brivio said they were preparing to go racing to cap off two years of testing and better prepare for 2015.
“There is now one idea to participate also at the last race as a wild card,” Brivio said. “This we are discussing it internally. We are getting ready for that and waiting for a final confirmation from our management to be there or not. The idea is we will have to test anyway after the race with our 2015 riders, which we don’t know yet who they are. And so it will make sense to race during the weekend. It is also a good gift for Randy de Puniet, who is doing a good job during these two years. So we can allow him to participate in the race and then it will be a preparation for the after race testing. But as I say, we are waiting final confirmation.”
Brivio went on to stress that racing at Valencia before the post-season test would help them prepare for Suzuki’s return to racing in 2015.
“This is one of our big interests because we are testing, but you never know the level until you go into the race,” said Brivio. “So to participate in the last race in November will allow us to get good information and to have all the winter to work without waiting for Qatar [the first round] 2015 to understand exactly the level. It would be a very good end of two years testing. So it’s like an exam before to go into the race.”
As far as the team’s progression testing, it’s still a work in progress.
“We working on the bike… the bike is continuously evolving and changing,” Brivio said. “We are expecting for next autumn again something new in term of chassis, some new evolution of the engine, but especially we working a lot on the electronics because we have to start everything from zero, as we had to switch from Mitsubishi ECU to Magnetti Marelli, this is based on the new regulation. And so this was a big job for us and this is not finished yet, but we have a few more months before the beginning of next season so of course we count to conclude this job. And in 2015 the plan is to race with our own software.
As far as who will be riding for Suzuki next year, that too was a work in progress.
“Of course we are talking to a few riders apart from the top four [Marc Marquez, Dani Pedrosa, Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo],” Brivio said. “We are talking to other riders, so we are progressing but we have nothing decided and nothing fixed yet. We are working on it and I hope we can announce as soon as possible. “
