Ben Spies praises Yamaha after 1000cc debut

Ben Spies praised the Yamaha engineering group after he made a fast debut on the Japanese factory’s new 1000cc machine in Brno yesterday.

The 2009 World Superbike champion ended with a best time of 1.56.306 to finish just 0.138s behind Casey Stoner’s best pace on Honda’s new RC213V 1000cc bike.
The Texan was only marginally slower than factory Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo, who logged a quickest lap of 1.56.253.

And he was thrilled that the new YZR-M1 was so competitive immediately out of the crate after Yamaha delayed the debut of its new machine by six weeks.

Spies and Lorenzo had initially anticipated riding the new bike in Mugello at the beginning of July.

But an engine failure during dyno testing in Japan saw the initial shakedown postponed until Brno.

Spies told MCN: “I need to thank the Yamaha guys. Everybody looked at it as though delaying the test was a bad thing but first day on it we’re not so far off and quicker than the 800, so I was really surprised.”

Spies said the new bike had bags of potential and he added: “To me it seemed like we were a second faster than the 800. I used the tyres up but I was still able to run low to mid-56s pretty consistently. It was getting to the point where I was getting pretty comfortable on the bike and I saw a couple of times going through the first split I was faster and luckily somebody pulled out in front of me and messed up my lap because I was on a pretty quick one. The last thing I needed to be doing was throwing it down the road on the first day.”

Spies and Lorenzo should be back on the 1000cc bike during a one-day test immediately after the forthcoming Misano round.

But Spies said the bike didn’t need any significant tweaks ahead of the second outing and he said: “I don’t think at the next test there will be anything drastic. It will be refinements and actually spending a full day testing because this was just a shakedown to see how we felt. To go that fast straight out of the box though is a great first impression.”