Also the track temperature went down 10° c from the morning session which wouldn’t have helped. My grid position was absolutely disastrous, 23rd and the lowest I’ve been for a long time but I knew I was capable of more and took the positives out of the Saturday morning session.
On Sunday morning warm-up I ran in new pistons and tried to get a feel for the bike with a full tank of fuel. It didn’t feel great, and with more weight on the front it felt half way in between what I had on Friday and Saturday. I would just have to wait for the load to go down in the race and in the last half it should start to feel better.
We were definitely going to go back to the medium front tyre for the race rather than the hard that I crashed on, it was going to last the race no problem but it was just a question of feeling on the brakes and stability on the way into the corner.
My start was an absolute flier, even though I did a better one in warm-up this one was still good. From 23rd on the grid I was 17th at the end of lap 1. I picked off a couple of others and then Ant West crashed in front of me and I lost about 1.5secs.
I was on the back of a group behind Sekiguchi, Corsi, Debon and then Guintoli who had broke away slightly. I was stuck behind Sekiguchi who was pretty good on the brakes and his bike was quite fast so he was hard to pass.
Debon and Corsi had started to get away and I could find no way by. I was losing time on the exits on the very first part of the gas which is a problem that we need to solve, the way my power works seems to make it hard to get on the gas early and gives me no feeling to the rear.
I had some new exhausts in Sachsenring and we’ve had this problem since around then so in Malaysia we will need to test more. I was in 14th and I knew there was one place I could pass Sekiguchi and was just waiting for the right opportunity but the exit from the corner before had to be spot on.
