More mechanical woes rob Camier of vital Friday track time

MV Agusta’s Leon Camier heads into the rest of the Thailand weekend on the back foot after only turning in a handful of laps today thanks to yet more engine issues.

The British rider lost the entirety of Friday at Phillip Island two weeks ago to an engine problem, but was able to sensationally recover to get into Superpole 2 and finish in the top 10 in both races.

Camier will have been hoping these issues would be behind him this weekend, but he had no such luck and was forced to watch opening practice from pit lane.

“Basically, we didn’t manage to get a lap in at all (in FP1),” said Camier.

“It’s a little bit frustrating to be honest. It was a similar thing to Australia; we managed to miss both sessions in Australia.”

His team was able to rectify the issue somewhat and send him out on track in FP2, but Camier only managed 15 laps in total compared to the 40 plus of almost the rest of the field.

To make matters worse, Camier found the bike’s set-up to be way off what he needs to ride confidently, something that will be difficult to completely fix with just 25 minutes available to him prior to qualifying tomorrow.

Nonetheless, the British rider was still able to drag a pretty respectable 1m34.953s out of his F4 to go 14^th and just over four tenths away from a place in SP2.

“We only managed to do a few laps at the end of FP2 here, but there were still a lot of problems,” he continued.

“My initial feeling with the chassis wasn’t that great; we need to make a few changes. It’s pretty difficult to have a good feeling on the bike when there’s so many other problems happening.

“Not an ideal start to the weekend for sure. It’s set us in a bad way for the weekend.

“To try and catch up from missing these session is fine when you’re in the ballpark with chassis and electronics, but we were a mile away with everything.

“It puts us in a real bad place for the rest of the weekend, but we’ve just go to make do with what we can, do the best we can. That’s all we can do.

“Hopefully the engine we’ve got in the bike now will be fine for the rest of the weekend. We’ve still got a problem with something, but fingers crossed it’ll be OK for tomorrow.”