Kawasaki´s John Hopkins wants a top ten result to finish what has been a challenging season for the Anglo-American rider.
John Hopkins in the Kawasaki Racing garage
John Hopkins and Anthony West of Kawasaki on their fourteenth and seventeenth placed grid slots at Valencia.
John Hopkins - fourteenth
`It´s been an interesting qualifying session today. The track was still wet in places when we first went out, so we just tried to put some laps together to get a feel for the slick tyres in the dry for the first time this weekend. We started our qualifying runs early as it started to rain on circuit, but with no real warm-up, we didn´t put a great lap together. We switched back to race tyres to work on our traction control and engine braking. We wanted to try and get the bike to turn a little bit better, particularly as this circuit requires a great degree of accuracy and agility from rider and machine. We had one final qualifying tyre late on in the session and we went a little bit quicker, but it wasn´t exactly where we were hoping to be for the final race of the year. We have a clear indication of what we need to improve for the race, and I hope it´s dry tomorrow as the aim is to finish inside the top ten.´
Anthony West - seventeenth
`After all of the rain yesterday and this morning, we have had very little time to set the bike up in the dry. We decided to run the first few qualifying tyres early on in the session, in case conditions deteriorated out on track. This maybe wasn´t the best idea, as it didn´t give us any dry set-up time or a build up in speed for our qualifying runs. After the rain, the end of the session was reasonably dry and we ran a final qualifying tyre, which did improve our time, but we´ve ended up in seventeenth on the grid. Obviously this has given us a lot of work to do, but my lap time on a race tyre is very similar to John´s, so my main aim will be to try and finish in front of him in my final race for Kawasaki.´
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