Copyright 2002, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

By David Swarts

During the recent AMA team test at California Speedway, we asked three-time AMA Superbike Champion Mat Mladin if he had any plans to race Suzuki’s new XERO V4 MotoGP four-stroke after the AMA season’s early end in August.

“I don’t think so,” said the 29-year-old Australian. “I highly doubt I’ll get a run on that bike. Suzuki seems to have their plans and their riders that they want to have involved in that. It’s not something I look to. If it happens then maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t. I’ll just have to see what the deal is at the time and how they wanted to structure a race or two.

“But I have plans to go home at the end of the year straight after the last race and do a little bit of racing in the National Championship at home. So we’ll just go over and do that and have a bit of fun and mess around.

“I’ve got a lot of things going on back home now. It would certainly be good to go over and do a bit of racing and to do a bit of racing back in front of the Australian fans, too. It’s been a long time, six or seven years now. It’s something that I certainly aspire to do some day when I finish racing professionally out of the country. I certainly want to go home and do some racing.”

Mladin has also said that when he retires from professional racing that he would like to run Suzuki road race and motocross teams in Australia.