APRILIA ON THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH ROW WITH BRADL AND BAUTISTA IN THE LE MANS QUALIFYING
A race that promises to be rather heated will end the MotoGP weekend at Le Mans, a track that has proven to be demanding for the RS-GP with Bautista and Bradl having some difficulties getting its power onto the tarmac.
For this reason testing continued once again today in the Aprilia camp on various setup, chassis and electronics solutions, focusing especially on improving the feeling for the riders in the acceleration phase. Stefan Bradl stopped the clock with an encouraging thirteenth time in FP4, the last free practice session before qualifying, a positive sign for the race.
In qualifying, the Aprilia Racing Team Gresini riders placed on the sixth row with the seventeenth best time (Bradl) and in the nineteenth spot on the seventh row of the grid (Bautista). These are starting positions that, in any case, do not affect Stefan and Alvaro’s ambitions, highly motivated to bring home the best possible result in the race.
ALVARO BAUTISTA
“In the two sessions today we took a few steps forward. However, there are still a few difficulties with the rear. If we try to stabilise the bike by increasing the electronic controls, we lose acceleration, whereas if we unleash the power, the bike tends to move around a lot. In qualifying I tried to push but I was unable to take a better placement in this situation. We are pretty sure about the tyre choice for the race tomorrow. I rode race distance with the option that we’ll use tomorrow, so I’ll be giving it my all. Let’s hope we’ll be able to learn a lot from the 28 laps of the race”.
STEFAN BRADL
“I can’t say that I’m disappointed because in qualifying I really gave it 100%. This weekend is proving to be more difficult than expected. Today we tried a lot of very different solutions again, trying to improve in the acceleration phase. Now we’ll try to analyse the data in order to try to improve for the race, making a few changes to the electronics and the rear suspension settings”.
