No major upgrades expected for Suzuki in 2015

The progress made early in the season by Suzuki placed somewhat unrealistic expectations on the returning Japanese manufacturer and with both Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales having enjoyed plenty of positive results their form in the middle third of the season has been somewhat disappointing for the Spanish duo.

The team expected to be able to bring on stream plenty of new developments over the course of the season with a seamless gearbox the most anticipated development however at Motegi Espargaro confirmed that it would be highly unlikely that there would be any major upgrades until 2016.

“We had expected to receive the gearbox at the beginning of the season, then it was Misano, then Aragon and finally I think that we’ll cancel the plans for the seamless transmission for this year and focus on what we have,” said Epargaro. “I think that it’ll be better to wait until next season for the gearbox.

“Maybe the gearbox will be ready for the last year but there isn’t much sense in taking a risk with it at the last race of the year. So maybe we’ll use it at the Valencia but we also have a private test in Malaysia after the last race too so maybe it’ll make sense to test it there. We’ll have the seamless gearbox but also some more power and a different swingarm to gain some grips. There’s a lot of new parts so it might be best to wait until next year.”

Both riders visited the Suzuki factory in the lead-up to this weekend’s race and Vinales commented that there was plenty of positives to take from meeting face to face with the racing department.

“We were able to be really direct and straight with the engineers and tell them what we need to improve on and that was really positive,” said the 2013 Moto3 world champion. “We are trying to improve many things to find performance and I think that we lost the way a little bit with the electronics. Here though I think we’ll focus on finding a good setup this weekend rather than just looking for a big solution and losing the way. In Aragon and Misano we were thinking of going in a different direction and we found that the bike has a certain limit and we need to work in that direction.

“We need to understand that we are losing a lot on the engine, maybe 30bhp, but the chassis is very strong. I think that we tried to find something on the chassis to go faster and I think that we went over the limit of the chassis and we lost the way for us to go fast. We know what we have and we need to work hard.”