Suzuki win World Endurance opener

The 2004 World Endurance championship began with a 500km race at Assen this weekend, and a victory for the Suzuki Castrol team of Vincent Phillipe, Olivier Four and Matthieu Lagrive.

The trio finished the race with a time of three hours, one minute and 29 seconds, just 18 seconds ahead of the Yamaha GMT 94 team of David Checa, William Costes and Sebastien Gimbert. The third place on the podium also went to a Yamaha team, with Gwen Giabbani, Frederic Jond and Stephane Duterne finishing three laps down for Yamaha Endurance Moto 38.

Reigning world champions, the British Yamaha Phase One Endurance team, were disappointed with an eventual 25th place, 17 laps down on the leaders, on the debut of their new R1.

The team of Dean Ellison, Stephane Mertens and Sebastien Scarnato were running in fourth place when electrical problems struck. Scarnato was riding when the bike cut out on lap 63, and was able to push the machine back to the pits, but Mertens and Ellison couldn’t salvage any points and focussed on getting good feedback on the Yamaha.

Phase One team manager Russell Beaney said, ” We can take a lot of good out of today. We’ve run a stock R1 engine and set the fifth fastest lap and learnt a lot about the bike. We don’t know what happened with the stoppage, we reset the computer and it fired up again. Treating today as a test session has been useful. The handling of the bike is excellent and we more power to come and a lot of weight to lose. By Albecete we should have made some good developments. ”

The British Diablo 666 Bolliger team finished sixth, with the Shell Endurance Academy completing the race in 23rd.

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