The 8 Suzuka 2023 Hours have started their long week which will end on Sunday with the arrival of the famous endurance event in Japan, at 19:30 p.m. local time.
This Wednesday, 5 timed practice sessions were scheduled which do not count for qualifying, but provide a more precise idea of the forces involved. They took place with the usual temperatures for this time of year in Suzuka, rising to more than 34° in the air and more than 55° on the ground at the start of the afternoon.
In the morning, the YART Yamaha Official EWC Team (Niccolò Canepa–Marvin Fritz–Karel Hanika) took the lead by setting the benchmark in 2'07.627 ahead of a whole gaggle of Hondas naturally led by the #33 of Team HRC with Japan Post ( Takumi Takahashi – Tetsuta Nagashima – Sylvain Guintoli–Étienne Masson) occupying 9th and 10th positions respectively, Kawasaki Webike Trickstar (Randy de Puniet–Kazuki Watanabe–Gregory Leblanc) 16th.
After this warm-up of an hour and a half, the last session of the morning, lasting an hour and fifteen minutes, saw the same trio occupy the leading places, the YART Yamaha Official EWC Team improving to 2'07.287, while the BMW # 37 and Suzuki #12 moved up the hierarchy significantly.
Time to eat, and the action on the track restarted for an hour, this time with the #33 Honda making all the fuss to record the best time so far in 2'07.205, ahead of the #7 Yamaha.
The Yoshimura SERT Motul continued to climb the rankings, but still almost 2 seconds behind.
9 thousandths of a second separated the Honda #33 and the Yamaha #7 at the end of the penultimate hour and a half session! Nobody (or almost) pretended, and there were 6 motorcycles in the same second, the BMW #37 coming back to 3 tenths, the Honda #1 to 4 tenths.
Also note the first Suzuki by half a second, but in this case the #96 of S-PLUSE DREAM RACING -ITEC (Cocoro Atsumi–Josh Waters–Marcel Schrötter)…
Finally, taking advantage of a very relative drop in track temperature (40°), everyone gave one last push for the last session, Yamaha #7 alone crossing the 2'07 mark in 2'06.778 , relegating his opponents led by the #12 Suzuki to more than a second.
The long week of the 8 Suzuka 2023 Hours continues today with technical controls, but we can already note the performance of the BMW #37, which is mixing with the best despite its Dunlop tires! It's no secret that Bridgestone develops particularly high-performance tires solely for this event and equips almost all of the top teams, and in any case the 9 other motorcycles in the top 10 overall, with particular support for # motorcycles. 1, 7, 12 and 33…
The overall results for testing sessions 1-5 are as follows (calculated by Bridgestone):
