Andrew Pitt debuts R1 superbike at Valencia

16/11/2004

Yamaha's 2005 Superbike World Championship campaign got underway today when new
signing Andrew Pitt completed 75 laps in a shakedown test at the Valencia
circuit in Spain.

Pitt, 28, will race the R1 for the Yamaha Motor Italia team in Yamaha's first
official entry in the championship since the 2000 season. The versatile
Australian rode for the team in the final three rounds of last season's
Supersport World Championship and has an outstanding pedigree, having won the
supersport title in 2001 and been a regular competitor in MotoGP.

The team concentrated on finding a good base setup for the Australian rider and
monitoring the YZF-R1's systems on its first circuit outing.

Pitt and Yamaha Motor Italia will spend a further two days at Valencia before
heading back to their Milan base to further develop the R1s.

Andrew Pitt

"It's been a really positive start for us. We all expected to have to deal with
a few gliches today but surprisingly we got in a lot of laps without any
problems at all. It's the first day with a new bike and new tyres so you're just
trying to learn as much as possible. We're all happy because we thought it would
be a harder day but we were able to make good progress working on the mapping
and playing around with the suspension a bit. Even now I'm confident that we'll
have a good bike at the start of the season. It's really exciting to be involved
with this project and working with the Yamaha Motor Italia team again."

Massimo Meregalli (Yamaha Motor Italia team coordinator)

"Everything has gone surprisingly well today. We started at 10 o'clock this
morning because always on the first day you expect little things to be not
working properly, but we had no problems at all. We expected to come here with a
new bike and start very slowly, but actually our speed has been ok, although the
point of this test is to work on making Andrew comfortable on the bike and to
gain as much data as possible to help us with our development work. This bike is
nothing like the one we expect to use next season. Most of the engine parts we
are using are 2004 Yamaha kit parts and a lot of the parts are still standard,
like the pistons and swingarm, which is only slightly modified version of the
stock one."