He may have hit the tarmac no fewer than three times at Vallelunga, and been ruled out of title contention, but
Troy Bayliss still found time to smile after the second race of the WSBK weekend.
The Australian bounced back from a race one defeat by local hero Max Biaggi to grab the second race spoils at the Roman circuit, ruining the Suzuki rider's hopes of a double win at his home track in front of a massive 80,000 crowd. Bayliss led the first three laps of race one before Biaggi came past, and was equally powerless to prevent Yamaha's
Noriyuki Haga from doing the same three laps later. The Japanese rider remained in the Australian's sights, however, although it took four attempts to get past before the Ducati man could clinch the runners-up spot.
"I was struggling to make the bike do what we want it to do," Bayliss declared afterwards, "Everything was working okay, but we really needed to do something with the settings to get that last bit of feeling. I had three or four goes at getting round Nori, it wasn't easy. Finally, I managed to do it, but there was no way I was going to catch Max unless he made a mistake."
The Ducati Xerox crew made a slight change to improve Bayliss' set-up for race two and the Australian rewarded their efforts by leading every lap. Biaggi again provided close attention, the pair almost touching on lap 15 before Bayliss was able to eke out a two-second lead and take his seventh win of the year.
"It's been a really hard day - it's pretty warm out there and Vallelunga is a very physical track," he noted after the podium celebrations, "I didn't see the race before ours and, when I went out on the sighting lap, there was cement dust everywhere for the oil. I was really concerned about that, so the track was warmer but slower as well because you couldn't use the right line.
