The 8 Hours of Suzuka, third round of the 2010 Qtel FIM Endurance World Championship, is scheduled on 25th July in Japan. With the official support from the Japanese factories, the competition promises to be stronger than ever. This round is non-compulsory, but teams will score points for the 2010 Qtel FIM Endurance World Championship. Four permanent teams are expected on the starting grid. 2009 Qtel FIM Endurance World Champion, Yamaha Austria Racing Team will try to take over the championship lead with Igor Jerman, Steve Martin and Gwen Giabbani. Current championship leader, the Bolliger Switzerland Team, will do their best to keep their leadership with Patrick Muff, Horst Saiger and Roman Stamm on their Kawasaki. For the Yamaha France GMT 94 Ipone, the mission will be to race ahead after a difficult race at Le Mans and a crash at Albacete. The Honda BMP Elf 99 Racing Team of Matthieu Lagrive, Damian Cudlin and Werner Daemen will also try to achieve a great race at Suzuka. The 2010 8 Hours of Suzuka favourite team is without any doubt the GSX-R1000 Yoshimura Suzuki of Daisaku Sakai and Nobuatsu Aoki, as they won the recent 300 km of Suzuka the 13th June and the 2009 edition of the 8 Hours of Suzuka. This year, they will also pair with Yukio Kagayama. Another 8 Hours of Suzuka great contender, the Honda FCC TSR, is entering with an impressive trio of riders: long-time team rider and third of the 2010 300 km Kosuke Akiyochi will race with World Superbike rider Jonathan Rea and Moto 2 Tech 3 rider Yuki Takahashi. We’ll also have to keep an eye on the Honda Dream RT Sakurai of Chojun Kameya (3rd of the 2009 8 Hours and 5th of the 2010 300 km), the Honda Musashi Harc-Pro of Ryuichi Kiyonari, Takumi Takahashi and Takaaki Nakagami (2nd of the 2010 300 km), and the Kawasaki Trick Star Racing of Atsushi Watanabe, Sinya Takeishi and Ryuji Tsuruta (2nd of the 2009 8 Hours). But the surprise could also come from to two very experienced riders, Shinichi Itoh and Makoto Tamada, racing on Honda for team Keihin Kohara. Another interesting fact from the coming 8 Hours of Suzuka is the attendance of French woman rider Magali Langlois on the Yamaha of Team Frontier Clever Wolf, 22nd of the 2009 Suzuka 8 Hours. Moto Journal and their two riders, Zef Enault and Stéphane Coutelle are entering this year with a Japanese Team, MSA 903, on a Yamaha. Several Japanese teams will also race on European machines! A Ducati 1098R, two Aprilia RSV4 and one BMW S 1000 RR are expected on the starting grid. More, from a press release issued by BMP-ELF-99 Racing Team: NO SUZUKA FOR BMP-ELF-99 RACING TEAM The privateer BMP-ELF-99 Racing Team will not travel to Suzuka for this year’s eight-hour race, having been unable to raise the additional sponsorship necessary to attend Japanese event. The BMP-ELF-99 Racing Team weren’t originally scheduled to race at the world famous eight-hour. However, after showing strongly in the two Endurance World Championship races so far, at Le Mans and Albacete, competing at Suzuka would have given the team the chance to further improve their position in the championship standings. The BMP-ELF-99 Racing Team’s sponsors and partners, particularly Elf and Dunlop, were extremely supportive of the team’s plan to race at Suzuka, with both working closely with Team Principal, Michael Bartholemy, to secure the additional sponsorship required to compete in Japan. But with timescales short, and the race fast approaching, Bartholemy was unable to find the funding necessary for the team to race competitively with their distinctive red, white and blue Honda CBR1000 at Suzuka. “It’s a big disappointment, as I honestly believe we could have made a real bid for the championship title off the back of a good result in Suzuka,” explained Bartholemy. “But, at the end of the day, we knew exactly what budget we needed to find to be competitive there and we didn’t quite manage to reach this figure. With what we did raise we could have gone to Japan, but we wouldn’t have had what we needed to be competitive and we’re not here just to make up the numbers.” “Not racing at Suzuka obviously doesn’t help with our bid to win the championship in our first year, but this will remain our aim this season. We’ve faced a steep learning curve in our debut season, but the team has adapted to this new challenge with alacrity and, I’m happy to say, I think we are now on the same level as some of the more experienced teams in the EWC paddock. Now we must focus on the Bol d’Or and the Qatar eight-hour race, two races at which I’m confident of strong results for the team.” The BMP-ELF-99 Racing Team currently lie eighth in the Endurance World Championship standings, just 16 points behind the current series leaders, Bolliger Team Switzerland. The BMP-ELF-99 equipe will contest the final two rounds of this year’s Endurance World Championship – the Bol d’Or at Magny-Cours on the weekend of 11/12 September and the 8-Hours of Doha at Losail in Qatar on 13 November.