Andrea Iannone looks back on his first 2017 MotoGP™ season aboard the Suzuki GSX-RR Team SUZUKI ECSTAR in the latest issue of Team Suzuki Racing magazine.
Andrea Iannone : “This year has not been an easy season for us, and certainly more difficult than expected. When we first tested the GSX-RR in Valencia last year, my feeling was very good and we believed we could achieve good results with the whole team.
Unfortunately, this did not happen. Despite a good first race in Qatar, we started to struggle a little and it took me a long time to get used to the Suzuki. My team leader, Marco Rigamonti, and I were new to the Suzuki team, which meant that we had to start from scratch in terms of knowledge of the bike and the work philosophy of the Japanese company.
Every MotoGP team is different and when you arrive after many years in a specific environment, it is very complicated to change the way you approach work and deal with problems. But as time passes in the pit, you learn to trust your colleagues and you benefit from the many things they can explain and teach you about motorcycling.
Patience and focus are the key to success, it's something I've always believed in. And this was proven again this year. We continued to work, little by little, step by step. We had a lot of frustrations, but even in the darkest times, we never lost our faith in hard work.
Finally, in Brno then in Aragon, new technical solutions on the machine reassured our convictions: we found the errors, we had solutions and 2018 seemed more promising after that. It came from the work of the team, which is key.
Alex Rins returned from injury and provided us with invaluable assistance in gathering more information, as did Sylvain Guintoli who provided us with his opinion which enriched our perspectives with more points of view. We cannot forget Takuya Tsuda who carried out the difficult work of testing the parts in Hamamatsu, Japan. Together we were able to become strong and confident, allowing the teams to work more intensively and the engineers to have more direction.
Together with my team and the entire team, we were able to put behind us the start of the season which had given us many headaches, because we believe in each of us and have confidence in the difficult work carried out by each one, which is the main lesson I take away from this first season with Suzuki in MotoGP. »
Andrea Iannone concluded this 2017 season in 13th position, having scored 70 points.
