Capirossi pledges future to Suzuki

The Italian veteran has finished in the top 10 in each of the four races so far this year, and currently lies fifth in the championship.

He says he is enjoying life at Suzuki and wants to stay for at least 2009 as well.

"I'm not quitting," he told Motosprint. "I'm staying here for one more year without a doubt. I feel really good here.

"I'm perfectly at ease with the team and with the Japanese. We work well together so I want to carry on with them for one more season. Obviously we'll have to sit around a table to start talking, but things are more or less sorted."

Capirossi admits that the GSV-R is still not performing as well as he and Suzuki would like, but he's confident that they can make progress with the bike.

"We have some important problems to solve but we need time," he added. "The problem is essentially in the frame set-up. With this bike we need to lean more than the others in order to take turns properly. We work more than the others on the tyre angle and this causes us many problems.

"We need to improve the chassis and we need to work on weight distribution. We also need to work on electronics because we aren't as advanced in this field as other manufacturers. But we'll soon have a bike completely different from this one."