Team Alstare Suzuki Corona Extra riders Troy Corser and Yukio Kagayama made a steady start on the first day of qualifying at Imola and posted the second and fourth fastest times respectively. Both riders had tyre grip problems in the afternoon when the temperature rose - a situation that has been with the team all season. James Toseland (Honda) set the day’s fastest lap, with a time of 1:50.039. In third place today, between Troy and Yukio is series leader Troy Bayliss (Ducati).
Troy - 2nd, 1:50.250I had a little crash at the start of the afternoon session, but don’t really know why. According to the telemetry my throttle position was the same as the lap before, so maybe I was on an old tyre, I don’t know. I banged myself a little , but no real damage, and I rode the bike back to the pits OK. I jumped on my spare bike and carried on working on a good set-up for the race. I'm reasonably happy with the bike’s set-up and our main concern is the tyres. When the temperature rises, we lose grip. When it’s hot, we can find a tyre that will last a race distance OK, but it’ll mean much slower lap times. I had quite a lot of wheelspin here today, but I guess that’s because of the nature of the layout. There are lot of camber changes and fast elevated turns and the bike seems to spin slide quite a bit. It’s an area we’ll work on in tomorrow morning’s warm-up
Yukio - 4th, 1:50.357In the morning, I believed that I’d finish with a lap in the 1:49s this afternoon, but when the temperature rose, it was not possible to do this time. As we’ve seen before, our tyres do not seem to like the heat so much and the lap times come down. My feeling was quite good in the morning and the only real problem was braking in to the corners. I pushed hard in the afternoon, but it made no big difference to my lap times. Tomorrow morning we’ll change the rear spring to start off and see if we can go faster.
Circuit: 4.959 kms.
Weather: Dry, sunny/cloudy 22-26C
Friday qualifying:1 Toseland (GB-Honda) 1:50.039,
2 Troy Corser (Aus-Alstare Suzuki Corona Extra) 1:50.250,
3 Bayliss (Aus-Ducati) 1:50.265,
4 Yukio Kagayama (J-Alstare Suzuki Corona Extra) 1:50.357,
5 Barros (Bra-Honda) 1:50.388,
6 Xaus (E-Ducati) 1:50.468,
7 Pitt (Aus-Yamaha) 1:50.502,
8 Fabrizio (I-Honda) 1:50.553,
9 Max Neukirchner (D-Alstare Engineering Corona Extra) 1:50.659,
10 Clementi (I-Ducati) 1:50.768,
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