Movistar Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo ended today’s 23-lap Grand Prix in second place, his best result since winning the Italian Grand Prix, after a late-race scrap between himself and teammate Valentino Rossi.
Lorenzo’s day got off to the worst possible start. Already lacking in confidence because of a lack of grip with the tyres, the Spaniard crashed during morning warm up whilst trying a used front. However, he claims this turned out to be a good thing as it made him do two sighting laps before heading to the grid.
Trying both rear tyres, Lorenzo found that he didn’t have a good feeling on the medium compound and so opted for the hard for the race, a tyre he’d struggled with during practice.
Ultimately, this allowed him to fight for the podium. After a lengthy encounter with Suzuki’s Maverick Vinales, Lorenzo found himself locked in third and quickly chasing down Rossi.
Lorenzo passed the Italian into Turn 4 with five laps to go, but he was unable to break away, Rossi’s tyres giving him more edge grip than Lorenzo’s. However, the Spaniard was able to punch out of the turns better, keeping him marginally ahead over the final few laps.
Rossi went for one more daring lunge on the inside of Lorenzo into Turn 12 on the penultimate lap, but he ran wide and this allowed the number 99 to cruise to the chequered flag.
“Sometimes a bad situation or a bad thing brings you a good thing and that‘s what happened when I crashed. I got almost injured and was almost in pain, as has happened in the past, but this made me do two warming up laps, one with the hard tyre and one on the soft tyre,” explained Lorenzo.
“Finally on these two laps the hard tyre suddenly gave me a good confidence, even if I was warming up and very slow, so my instinct told me that I needed to change my race tyre to the hard one and this crash and bit of instinct for sure gave me the possibility to do this race the way I was riding it. I didn‘t expect to finish on the podium, I thought I would finish maybe sixth or seventh, but finally the race was again surprising. It‘s been a difficult weekend for me, but sometimes these kind of situations bring you to the top.”
Comments.
Loading comments…