Team Yoshimura Suzuki's Yukio Kagayama and Kousuke Akiyoshi raced their GSX-R1000 to victory in the Suzuka 8 Hour World Endurance third round in Japan - the team's first Suzuka endurance win for almost 30 years. It was back in 1978 at the inaugural Suzuka 8 Hour race that the team tasted victory aboard their GS1000R. Kagayama led from the start from Honda's Ryuichi Kiyonari, Norick Abe (Yamaha) and Tady Okada (Honda), opening up a 15-second advantage by the one hour mark when Akiyoshi took over.
Team Yoshimura Suzuki’s Nobuatsu Aoki and Atsushi Watanabe raced their GSX-R1000 into third position in the Suzuka 8-Hour World Endurance fifth round as reigning World Champions Suzuki Castrol crashed three times, finished a lowly 38th, but still came away with a 21-point lead in the series.
Reigning World Endurance Champions Suzuki Castrol clawed back from a heavy crash in the first hour to finish runners-up at the Le Mans 24-hour second round in France that finished this afternoon. The Suzuki Endurance Racing Team (SERT) of Keiichi Kitagawa, Mathieu Lagrive and Vincent Philippe were only two laps behind winners, National Motors Honda, after 817 laps of racing.