Pirelli Aragon Difficult round for the Pata Yamaha team

Despite an excellent performance in Tissot-Superpole, with Sylvain Guintoli and Alex Lowes starting immediately behind poleman Tom Sykes, the Pata crescent Yamaha team was unable to achieve equally satisfactory results in the two races at Motorland in Aragon.

In Race 2 Alex Lowes suffered an accident on the sixth lap which dropped him to 18th position, from which he recovered to the top ten with two laps to go.
His finished ninth, to the detriment of his teammate.

Opting for a conservative start from his position on the front row, in an attempt to maintain the good condition of his tyres, Guintoli began to fight from fifth place in the second heat.
The strategy, however, didn't work as he wasn't able to have a sufficiently incisive pace: seventh for most of the race, he progressively dropped in the final laps, finishing in tenth position.

“Today everything went well” – he said alex lowes – “I learned a lot about the bike this weekend and I feel that I have made a step forward in terms of my riding style on the YZF-R1. In Race2, apart from some problems at the start - which we still need to resolve - I actually rode very well. We had some small goals in terms of lap time, if the race had similar conditions to Saturday, and it did, and we managed to achieve our goals. My second half of the race was better than Saturday, so there are a lot of positives. Obviously we don't have the results we would like yet, but we are learning and this was only our third race weekend. This was our best weekend so far, we were a little closer to fighting for the podium and I can't wait to get to Assen."

“With the chassis and electronics we looked for a very different solution for Race 2, but the final result was very similar” – he complained Sylvain Guintoli – “Towards the end of the race we struggled a lot, this time I was a little more conservative at the start, but this strategy simply didn't work. They were two very complicated races for us, but on the Aragon track the tires worked with difficulty and this highlighted the fact that we need to work to obtain better performance with used tyres. In Superpole, both with the race and qualifying tires we demonstrated that we have a very fast pace, and we need to be able to demonstrate this in the race too, when there is a bit of grip missing. This is the goal, we need to work and try to take the next step."

“Alex had a strange race” – added the Team Principal Paul Denning – “He had difficulty entering the corners in the first five laps and then concentrated on finding the right rhythm and established an excellent pace which saw him move up to ninth from 18th – and with that same pace he would have could have reached fourth place."