I’m a fighter, but I know I need to adapt my mentality and be patient as I keep working for the future. It’s never easy to fight further back, but nevertheless I battled until the last corner for that eleventh place. Not an easy race, and the fact it was shortened meant that when I did make a couple of small mistakes, I had no time to recover.
But the race got underway in warmer conditions than we saw in previous sessions, and I struggled a lot with the feeling in relation to every aspect of the bike setup. But going into the race I was expecting much more, because our pace during the weekend hasn’t been bad at all, honestly. We need to improve the setup to do that, so I would say that P10 is about right, considering how close the gaps were. In the Superpole we weren’t able to fully exploit the extra grip of the qualifying tyre.
#Little fighter 2 1 9c exercise free
In this morning’s final free practice session, I felt good enough on the bike, testing tuning for the race and the soft tyre compound that I didn’t use yesterday. What can we say about today? Not what we expected or what we’re working towards of course. In the final laps it became increasingly difficult for Iker to maintain strong pace, but he kept battling hard against the riders in his group until the very last corner, ultimately crossing the line eleventh. Xavi was able to defend his position all the way to the line to finish eighth and earn a handful of precious championship points. Seven laps in and Vierge gained a position while Lecuona slipped one place back. Iker was soon up behind his team-mate, the Team HRC duo lapping with similar times to each other. Lecuona lost a little ground off the line to find himself thirteenth through the first corners, while Vierge made a very strong start from the fifth row of the grid, moving up into tenth place through the first turns. The delay meant that it was also necessary to shorten the race, from an originally planned 20 laps to just 14 laps. Team-mate Vierge finished just three tenths behind (1’40.624) in thirteenth place, for a fifth-row start.Īn incident during the SSP300 race meant that the first of the weekend’s two Superbike races got underway more than an hour later than scheduled, at 15.15 local time (CET-1). This remained his fastest time, enough for him to place tenth in a particularly tight battle that saw the top thirteen riders all within one second, meaning a fourth row start on the race 1 grid. With just fifteen minutes in which to make an impression, Lecuona pushed hard to set 1’40.342 in the opening minutes. Having wrestled all race long with a combination of unexpected difficulties, their race results – eighth and eleventh – speak volume about the young rookies’ fighting spirit and commitment.Īfter making some final adjustments during the third and final practice session, a session in which the entire field was able to set quicker times than yesterday, Team HRC headed out on track for Superpole. As round nine of the Superbike World Championship continues at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve, Team HRC riders Xavi Vierge and Iker Lecuona have now completed the first of the weekend’s three races.
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