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.”
