Only Three Permanent Teams

The Suzuka 8 Hour race is the most competitive and arguably the most prestigious round of the Endurance FIM World Championship. This year, only three of the permanent teams taking part in the full World Endurance Championship will travel to Japan to compete at Suzuka.

Yamaha Austria, Yamaha Phase One and BK Maco Moto Yamaha will be the only representatives of the FIM series to line up alongside the local teams. This is the lowest number of non-Japanese entrants since 2000, when Phase One, Police Nationale and the QMS Aprilia were the only international teams entered.

YART are the most likely to do well at Suzuka based on this year's form, although they're probably unlikely to continue their unbeaten record. BK Maco Moto and Phase One will be hoping to build on their performance at Albacete, with Phase One stating their aim to be a top ten finish.

Entry List

The full entry list has been translated and is available on the Motoracing-Japan website; as ever, we'd be lost without them when Suzuka come around.

Suzuka 8 Hour Entry List: www.motoracing-japan.com/result/spl/098h_e.html

Although Honda and Yamaha have announced that they won't be entering factory supported teams, we expect some of the semi-factory teams to be better supported than usual. Honda aren't going to let Yoshimura Suzuki beat them twice in three years.

Road to 8 Hours

The Suzuka 300km “Road to 8 Hours” endurance race is always a good guide to form in the 8 hour itself. This year it was won by Kohsuke Akiyoshi and Shin'ichi Itoh (yes, that Shin'ichi Itoh) on the FCC TSR Honda, with Yamaguchi and Konishi on the Harc Pro Honda second and Sakai and Tokudome on the Yoshmura Suzuki third.

The Team Green Kawasaki ZX10 was fourth, with the Honda Dream Sakurai Honda fifth. FCC-TSR are an independent team, but both Harc-Pro and Sakurai appeared to be well supported by Honda personnel at last year's 8 Hour race...

Time Table and Updates

Free Practice starts on Thursday afternoon, with qualifying spread across all of Friday. Saturday sees the 4 Hour rendurance race for Supersport bikes followed by the Top Ten Trail special stage shoot-out and the Eve of Suzuka celebration. The race itself starts at 11:30 am local time (3:30am BST, 4:30am CET) and finishes shortly after sunset at 7:30pm local time (11:30am BST, 12:30pm CET).

The full timetable is here: www.suzukacircuit.jp/cms-data08/pdf/timetable.pdf

You can follow the race and build-up on our message board (and if you're there, please let us know what's going on) and we'll post a link to the official results page as soon as it goes live.

www.suzukacircuit.jp/8tai