A less than simple start for Team HRC at Donington Park

“A very difficult Friday for us. To be honest, the feeling with the bike is not even too bad, but we are slow. We lose a lot in acceleration when we open the throttle, suffering from a lot of spin. When we have circuits with long straights, we can recover in the final part of them, but here, with all the super short straights, we lose a lot. We need to focus on improving grip, and if we can do that, we can make a step forward for tomorrow, though I don’t know where that would put us in the standings. Every year, the others seem to go faster while we remain more or less on the same level. We can only keep working, of course, so let’s see if we can come up with something for tomorrow and what the weather will be like for the race.”

“I'm very frustrated with our first day here at Donington Park, not just for my position but mainly for the feeling with the bike. I was expecting much better after all the work and testing we did during recent weeks. This morning, we started with a setup based on the work done in the last tests, but I could not find the same feeling at all and struggled more or less through every section of the track, especially in the changes of direction. We made some modifications between the sessions, but this afternoon the feeling was, if possible, even worse. The team have analysed the data and decided on some big changes for tomorrow. I can only hope it will work because, although this track is one of the trickiest for us, we need to be doing a lot better than this.”