Honda HRC battles through Donington challenges and makes progress

“This weekend has been a bit black and white for me. Yesterday we had an electrical issue with the bike. We thought we had solved it, and everything seemed fine during warm-up, but in the Superpole race the same problem arose again. That wasn’t ideal because we missed out on valuable race laps and tyre consumption data. Honestly, I was quite frustrated, also because I wasn’t feeling great on the bike and we needed that information to make some setup adjustments. After that, I told Tom (Jojic) that we had to turn things around and try to reverse the situation. To cut a long story short, from the very first lap of Race 2 I immediately felt a real improvement and the bike felt good, with much more grip than we’d had all weekend, even more than in qualifying. The tyre choice was the right one. Of course, starting from very back on the grid and with such a tight field, there wasn’t huge room for improvement, but I was able to make several overtakes and maintain a decent race pace. At least this afternoon I was able to fight, I enjoyed the race, and ultimately we brought home a not-so-bad tenth place.”

“I’m very frustrated with today’s race and with the weekend overall, to be honest. I already knew this would be a tough round, but of course you always hope things will go a bit better. It’s true that we worked well and that we were closer in terms of lap times than in previous years, but unfortunately everyone else has also improved, so even if the gap to the front was smaller, the races were still extremely difficult. Once again, I struggled with rear grip from the very beginning, which made things hard in the battles. I had to fight from far back and every time I managed to overtake someone, they would get back past me as soon as I tried to accelerate. So I couldn’t really move forward and was constantly fighting, losing contact with the group ahead, and having to start over. It’s frustrating because I actually felt good on the bike — the feeling is strong, especially in braking and corner entry — but we’re still missing too much in the drive area, and that makes it really hard to ride the way I want. The potential is there, but we just can’t show it properly right now. That said, the team is working really hard to fix the problem or at least reduce it, and I really appreciate that.”