Yamaha’s Alex Lowes has come away from the final race of the weekend at Imola with a top six result, but is left frustrated at a lack of performance from his YZF-R1 at the Italian circuit.
The Briton came into the weekend confident of carrying on his top five form from Assen, but endured a largely difficult weekend. Lowes could only manage 11th in qualifying, and finished behind team-mate Michael van der Mark in race one in eighth.
Despite the best efforts of his team, the R1 never really made a massive leap forward for Sunday’s race and Lowes was unable to utilise his second row starting position to stay with the leaders.
“It was a really tough race,” he said.
“Obviously, the guys have worked really hard this weekend; it is so easy to look back on a weekend in hindsight and say we could have done this, we could have done that.
“At Imola we just couldn’t find the performance we needed from the bike, the guys never stopped trying and in the race sixth place was all we could manage.”
Lowes was once again locked in a battle with team-mate van der Mark and the Milwaukee Aprilia of Eugene Laverty, with whom he was involved in a big accident on Saturday. As the race wore on, Lowes was able to go almost two seconds clear of the Northern Irishman to take sixth at the chequered flag.
Happy enough with the result considering the difficulty of this weekend, Lowes is still unpleased at his sizeable gap to the leaders Imola. He hopes to close the 17-second deficit to the front at his home round at Donington in two weeks’ time.
“It was a tough race for me, but the least my team deserve is for me to five everything I’ve got until the end.
“We could only finish sixth, I am reasonably happy as it was the best I could do with what we had, but I am not happy because we were too far from the front.
“We will try to learn some things from the weekend, and we will be pushing hard at the next round at Donington, which is my home race. I am really looking forward to it.”
Team-mate van der Mark was hoping his strong end-of-race pace would carry him through to a strong finish in race two starting from fourth. However, a set-up change in warm-up failed to deliver on the promise showed and he struggled for consistency in the race.
Unable to run the pace of the sister Pata Yamaha, the Dutchman also slipped behind Laverty and the hard-charging BMW of Jordi Torres by the chequered flag to finish ninth.
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