Top Cars

There's still over one month of 2007 remaining, but development of the new 2008 Suzuki is already well advanced.

By Peter McLaren

The 2007 MotoGPseason was still underway when Suzuki gave a prototype version of the 2008 GSV-R its race debut, at the hands of test rider Nobuatsu Aoki in last month's Malaysian Grand Prix- and by the time the team returned to Sepang for testing last week the '08 was already around half a second quicker than this year's model.

"We started the test on the '07 and then took the settings from that over to the '08 and it worked really well," Chris Vermeulen told Crash.net at Sepang. "Loris [Capirossi] said the same. We have a new chassis that makes the bike easier to turn at various lean angles - something both John [Hopkins] and I had asked for. We will get the full version of the new engine later. Aoki has been testing it and is not quite happy with it yet. We're really lucky to have someone of Nobu's experience; it really speeds up the whole development process."