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2016 Suzuka Eight-Hours: ‘Any of our riders can take pole,’ says Yamaha boss

Factory Yamaha Suzuka boss Wataru Yoshikawa believes any of his three riders will be able to take pole position during qualifying for Saturday’s Suzuka Eight-Hours after setting the fastest laps in free practice today.

The team clocked a 2’08.690 in the first session and a 2’08.194 in the second session to take the top spot on the combined timesheets and Yoshikawa says that now Alex Lowes, Pol Espargaro and Kats Nakasuga are comfortable with the bike and track, they can up the pace tomorrow.

“Katsuyuki recently finished testing the YZR-M1 and Pol Espargaró just finished a MotoGP race, so I instructed them to be careful and take it easy today since we’re only just beginning. Especially today, there were no separate sessions for class entries and there were a lot of bikes out on the track so we needed to avoid getting caught up in any accidents. But we finished the day’s sessions without incident so we can breathe easy for a bit,” he said.

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“Alex joins us this year and he has the same speed as Nakasuga and Pol. I think with the level of our riders, if we were to let them go out and ride as fast as they can, any one of them could take pole position for us. But having teammates compete against each other won’t lead us to results, and while that’s something we’re aware of, all three of them are professionals so I’m not particularly worried. We started riding today and rather than chasing times, our main goal was to get all three riders used to lapping Suzuka Circuit on the EWC-spec YZF-R1. We’ll start slowly upping the pace tomorrow.”

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