Tough Sachsenring MotoGP Race For Suzuki Ecstar

Team SUZUKI ECSTAR’s Maverick Viñales and Aleix Espargaró scored in the points at today’s drama-packed German MotoGP World Championship ninth round at Sachsenring that saw both wet-and-dry conditions and a necessary pit-stop with nine laps to go to change to softer tyres when the racing-line dried-out. The end of the race saw Viñales in 12th place and Espargaró in 14th.

Both Spaniards had decent jumps on their GSX-RRs in the wet start from their second and third-row grid positions, but gradually lost places as the race progressed. But, in the middle of the 30-lap race, they began to climb-back through the field. They both made a pit-stop to change the bikes from ‘wet’ set-up to ‘dry’ before the two-thirds race distance, but could not quite get back the positions they lost before the chequered flag.

Team SUZUKI ECSTAR will now move to Spielberg, Austria, for a two-days of testing on Tuesday and Wednesday, as a preparation for the race that will be held there in August.

Ken Kawauchi – Technical Manager:

“Unfortunately this has been another difficult race for us. At Assen already we struggled in the wet, for this reason we got back to the factory and exploited the one extra week break to prepare some countermeasures for these kind of conditions. Then here, in Germany, the rain came only on Sunday, so we could try only a very few of them; and unfortunately they proved to not be as effective as we had wished. The problem we have is clear, and we are all aware of it, so we will exploit the summer break to further-develop some solutions in order to be better-prepared for the next time we find such hard conditions.”

Maverick Viñales:

“This has been a very tough race for me, the result is not satisfying at all and it means we are not yet competitive in the wet races. We still have to improve the traction, with these conditions I cannot push and be performing because I can’t find acceleration. It is a problem we have also in the dry, but there I can counterbalance with the riding, and on wet it becomes bigger and bigger, so it is hard to keep the competitor’s pace. The base-pack we have is really good, but this struggle with the grip is preventing us harvesting better results. I know Suzuki is working hard on this and I hope they can find some solutions soon, either with the electronics or with the set-up.”

Aleix Espargaró:

“Today’s race has been very hard, we still struggle to find good traction and this prevents me accelerating properly. We need to better-understand and work-on the electronics; this morning in the warm-up the traction control was too weak and had a lot of spinning, so we tried to increase for the race, but eventually we went in the opposite direction and had a problem with too much electronics cutting the power. This is an issue we have to further investigate; we have been improving a lot lately on many aspects, but the electronics still have many grey areas to us.”

GoPro MOTORRAD GRAND PRIX DEUTSCHLAND RACE RESULT:

1 Marc MARQUEZ – Repsol Honda Team – 47’03.239
2 Cal CRUTCHLOW – LCR Honda – 47’13.096 + 9.857
3 Andrea DOVIZIOSO – Ducati Team – 47’14.852 + 11.613
4 Scott REDDING – OCTO Pramac Yakhnich – 47’15.231 + 11.992
5 Andrea IANNONE – Ducati Team – 47’25.994 + 22.755
6 Dani PEDROSA – Repsol Honda Team – 47’29.159 + 25.920
7 Jack MILLER – Estrella Galicia 0,0 Marc VDS – 47’29.282 + 26.043
8 Valentino ROSSI – Movistar Yamaha MotoGP – 47’29.688 + 26.449
9 Hector BARBERA – Avintia Racing – 47’29.853 + 26.614
10 Alvaro BAUTISTA – Aprilia Racing Team Gresini – 47’34.513 + 31.274
11 Eugene LAVERTY – Pull & Bear Aspar Team – 47’44.447 + 41.208
12 Maverick VIÑALES – Team SUZUKI ECSTAR – 47’45.397 + 42.158
13 Bradley SMITH – Monster Yamaha Tech 3 – 48’06.368 + 1’03.129
14 Aleix ESPARGARO – Team SUZUKI ECSTAR – 48’09.330 + 1’06.091