The squad had flown during winter testing, but Loris Capirossi was sixth and 1.4 seconds slower than pace-setter Casey Stoner tonight.
He felt that Suzuki had gone the wrong way on set-up and ran out of time to try alternatives now that practice has been cut back to just 45 minutes on Fridays.
"For the first practice it was not too bad, but we did struggle a bit with the setting," said Capirossi. "In the recent test it was not perfect so we tried a new one and this didn't work as well so we will use some stuff from that and go back to the old one.
"We have a good idea what we need to modify tomorrow and I am sure we will be stronger. 45 minutes seems a really short time and it is difficult to get a lot of work done, also with the limited amount of tyres - especially on such a dirty track - made it quite tough.
"Overall we are quite pleased and we will have quite an easy way to improve tomorrow."
Capirossi's team-mate Chris Vermeulen was only 14th quickest, having struggled with his tyres.
"It was not really the start to the weekend that we wanted," he said. "We have a limit on tyres and didn't really want to use any of the hard front tyres that we will be using for racing.
"We tried to make the softer one work and we were going not too bad in the beginning of session, but at the end I kept the front tyre in and there was a lot of movement in the front of the bike and struggled to keep corner speed up.
"It was a bit frustrating that we couldn't go as fast as we have been round here, but I still have all my hard front tyres left and hopefully the speed will come back when we put that in."
Team boss Paul Denning is expectin Suzuki to be much closer to the leaders by qualifying.
"We didn't achieve what we wanted to this evening in terms of the result, but we are fully aware that the favoured front tyre for both riders wasn't used, so that we could keep enough for tomorrow and race day," said Denning. "I am sure with the data the guys have collected tonight - and the favoured tyres - we'll be a lot closer to the sharp end tomorrow."
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