After an up-and-down opening race weekend at Phillip Island last month, the official BMW team will be looking for greater consistency of results. In fact, having missed the two races themselves after a high-speed collision with another rider in morning warm-up in Australia, Ruben Xaus is simply looking for a less dramatic weekend in Portimao than he had in Australia. "After my crash with Noriyuki Haga in Australia I flew home on the Sunday night and, for sure, I did a lot of thinking," said Ruben. "I took a calm, careful look at the race weekend, and at the beginning of March I sat down with Davide Tardozzi, Massimo Bartolini and my crew chief Wolfgang Martens to look at the situation. One thing is clear: I know that I'm capable of setting fast lap times without any problems. And that's why I'm feeling confident. I'm looking forward to Portimão. The track is like a rollercoaster and I like it a lot. It's really varied; there are a lot of fast corners, but also some slower ones. You take some of them blind, so as a rider you have to be able to rely totally on your skill and intuition. Portimão is certainly one of the most exciting venues in the championship."
For Troy Corser, some happy aspects of the PI weekend will be welcome at Portimao, a circuit he rates as tricky but potentially rewarding. "We had an extensive test at Portimão back in January," said Troy, before continuing, "and the circuit is technically very challenging with several uphill and quite steep downhill sections. You spend most of the lap in second and third gear. The bike we raced at Phillip Island is very similar to the one we tested at Portimão. Although the two tracks have different characteristics, I hope we can use Australia as a benchmark and kick on from there. If the bike works like it did in Race 2 in Australia, I think we can be relatively confident about our chances. There's a four-week gap between the first and second race weekends this year, which is fairly long. I've been training pretty much every day to make sure I stay in shape and am as well prepared as I can be for the second race weekend of the season."
