Maverick Vinales “surprised” by lack of MotoGP speed despite “not bad” shoulder

Maverick Vinales says he is “surprised” by his lack of MotoGP speed at present, feeling like the shoulder that has been a problem since last July is improving.

The Spanish rider tried several times to return from the dislocated shoulder he suffered in Germany last summer, his most recent return coming at the Catalan Grand Prix.

Hungary this weekend is Vinales’ third race back, but he was second-last in qualifying and only 19th in the race.

For a rider who just over a year ago was the leading KTM hope, the results are below his expectation, but it’s not so much his physical condition that he feels is holding him back at the minute as the feeling he has on the bike.

“I'm surprised because I thought I had much more speed,” Maverick Vinales said after the MotoGP Sprint in Hungary.

“But this is the situation, so we need to understand. 

“How I feel now [is] that you need to ride the bike all the time on the limit, and I'm not able to do it at the moment. So I need to work, and I need to have patience to understand how to do it.”

The Tech3 KTM rider said that he is still missing strength in his shoulder, but that his biggest limitation at the moment is his lack of understanding of how to ride the RC16.

“The strength obviously needs to improve, but it's not bad considering how I felt in Mugello,” he said of his shoulder.

“Now I feel better. It's just that I need to understand how to ride the bike – it's very complicated because I'm not able to find any strong point where I can rely on to do a lap time. 

“So, every time I try to brake late I miss the corners; then I try to do corner speed, I don't turn. It's all the time this feeling that it [the rear of the bike] comes around.”

Vinales had a poor start to the Sprint because of a start device problem, but he was able to find a positive in that.

“The front device, I didn’t disengage and then I keep it for I don’t know how many corners,” he said.

“It was a disaster. But it’s okay because then I had some space to work with the bike because we did a different setting for the Sprint and we see some positives, some negatives, that probably going in the group [it would have been] hard to see. 

“We’re working hard to understand how to improve to be quicker with the bike.”