Bennetts Suzuki riders Ryuichi Kiyonari and Tommy Bridewell will stick with the 2016 GSX-R1000 this season but the team will get the new brands new model after the summer in order to begin development for 2017.

Team owner Martin Halsall is expecting to take delivery after the bike makes its debut at the Suzuka Eight-Hours and he says that trying to shoehorn the race readiness of a new model into this year while also running the current bike would have been too much.

“I’m very, very happy with what we’ve got,” he told Bikesport News. “I’m happy that we’re getting the new bike more towards the end of this year and then we’ll have all winter to gear up for 2017 with the new machine.”

“A lot of people, even testing down at Donington people were saying to me, ‘Oh you’re not on the new bike?’ and ‘I thought we’d see the new bike. It seems to be taking forever’ and it isn’t. If we get the bike even this year it is early.

“There has been quite a lot of testing done at the moment even now with Yoshimura over in Japan. They are actually testing and developing the bike now and I’ve heard that we could see the bike at the Suzuka Eight-Hours.

“That also gives me comfort, because initially it was going to be, ‘Wow this is going to be amazing we’re going to be the first people on track with it’, which could have been very exciting but it could also have been very disastrous.”

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