Yamaha’s Andrew Pitt leads Haga at Phillip Island

Raceline Photography
By blue2bikes
January 26 2005

Having completed three days of World Superbike testing at Phillip Island in Australia, it was Yamaha Italia’s Andrew Pitt who came out to take the fastest time of 1min 33.9 seconds, which was faster than the time set by Alstare Suzuki’s Troy Corser a few days earlier.

Although the air temperature hit 30 degrees, they completed their programme of parts evaluation - that will be used for their final specification machines in time for next month’s opening race, to take place at Qatar’s Losail circuit.

Andrew was able to lap consistently in 1min 35 seconds, and his flying lap of 1min 33.9seconds was 0.3 seconds faster than Suzuki’s fastest test lap, set last week by Troy Corser. The fastest race lap of 2004 was set by Garry McCoy on board a Xerox Ducati, with 1min 34.514secs.

Andrew said, “We have made progress here at Phillip Island, based on how well we went at Valencia. We came here thinking we were a bit further ahead than we first thought. We can go a little faster through improvements to the front end. Even in these hot conditions I was able to keep it in the low 35s on a race tyre.”

Noriyuki Haga, although slower than his team-mate, has now got a greater understanding of his new Yamaha YZF-R1 after three days of testing - with a best time of 1min 35.0secs, which was 0.2secs slower than Troy Corser’s partner Yukio Kagayama. Nori said, “We need more testing and development before we are able to win, but I am sure we can do it. We learned more about the bike - the four-cylinder bike is very fast, but we have just started working with the bike and there is a lot of learning to do. This is a challenge for us. The bike has a lot of potential - we must make some small changes to get it just right.”

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