Santander Yamaha team-mates Noriyuki Haga and Troy Corser will be scrapping it out for second place at the World Superbike finale in Portimao this weekend.

Haga currently has a nine-point advantage over the Aussie who himself is only 18 points ahead of Alstare Suzuki's Max Neukirchner but the playing field is level as none of the riders have been to the track before.

“Portimao is a new circuit which I have never ridden. We planned to test last week but unfortunately that test was cancelled so we will start from scratch," said Haga, who switches to the Xerox Ducati squad for 2009.

"Anyway, this is the last race of the year so I would like to finish well, for me and especially for our team. This season we have all tried and worked really hard and we had both good and bad days.

"This is the last race for us so I will try extra hard to get good results for Yamaha, my team and our supporters. I will send ‘Kando’* to every race fan and all my supporters until the end of my last race with Yamaha.”

Corser is equally upbeat and optimistic about his last appearance for the Yamaha team as he will move to BMW for 2009. “I’m looking forward to this weekend and I’ll be going all out to get one or two of those wins we have been trying to take all year," he said.

"It will be very interesting riding at an all-new track that maybe only one or two of the other guys have ridden at before. Most others, like us, have not been there to test. I don’t know anything about the circuit at all but we are in the same position as we were in at Miller in America this year. That was a completely new track for us as well.”