MotoGP News: Suzuki faces engine problems
The current 2010 season of MotoGP has made it fairly evident that the engine manufacturers are finding it hard to retain engine life. The financial depression which seems to have had hit an unending line of things has crept its way into the motorsport industry. Teams and manufacturers are already on an extremely tight budget and doling in extra finances for further research and development of customized engines does not seem to pass as a viable option for most of the participating teams.
Last weeks’ qualifiers at Sachsenring came as a blatant testimony to the fact that engine manufacturers were finding it extremely hard to cope-up with engine life, when Jorge Lorenzo’s Fiat Yamaha’s engine blew up. The Spaniard's bike was set ablaze and sprayed oil all over the track, causing Randy de Puniet and Ben Spies to crash into each other.
However, the problems being faced by the Yamaha team are nothing as compared to Suzuki’s. The Rizla Suzuki riders seem to be changing engines at an extremely fast pace this time around. After just 8 of the allocated 18 races, Alvaro Bautista is already on his fifth engine while Loris Capirossi is almost through with his fourth. Suzuki has almost depleted its quota of six engine allocations in the last season and it is apparent that there is no way that Suzuki can make it to the end of the season without conceding a penalty.
To save Suzuki the incurrence of a penalty and ease the stress on the team, manufacturers have now decided to give them an extra three engines per rider. If the penalty had been incurred, that would have meant that Suzuki riders would have started the race from the pit lanes 10 seconds after the rest of the grid. It comes as a lucky break for Suzuki because at the pace they were heading with the engine fiasco, they would have started from the pit lanes on almost all the races after the one at Indianapolis. With this allocation of extra engines, there is a bright chance for Suzuki to make it to Valencia without using engines outside the imposed limit.
Suzuki has been one of the most destitute teams to take part in the 4-stroke era of the MotoGP. The financer of the team, Hamamatsu, barely finances them enough to participate in the race. Like the Kawasaki team, which dropped out of the MotoGP in 2008, Suzuki might have considered walking that path if they had not been allowed the liberty of three extra engines.
Other team mangers and manufacturers, strongly criticized Suzuki for only participating with two bikes when the others came in with four or more and did not particularly welcome the idea of extra engines for Suzuki. The dilemma currently being faced by Suzuki is partly because of their own decision to run with two bikes. Had they been running with four or more bikes in the past championships, the engineers would have had sufficient data in the testing phase to rectify the problems with the GSV-R’s engine reliability.
If Suzuki was to drop out, which seems more that probable at the moment, it would generate humongous pressure on the rest of the teams to increase the number of bikes on the grid to have a valid championship run in the next season. So as far as the other teams are concerned, it is in their best interest to give Suzuki a little leverage with the underperforming engines rather than putting new racing machines on the grid altogether for the next championship.
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