Takahashi: Hairpins are my speciality!

Yuki Takahashi believes one of his strongest points as a rider is dealing with slow hairpin corners, a feature of Le Mans - venue for this weekend's French Grand Prix.

But unfortunately for the MotoGP rookie, those same corner characteristics are also an area of weakness for his RC212V.

Takahashi, Spanish MotoGP 2009
Takahashi, Spanish MotoGP 2009
© Gold and Goose

Yuki Takahashi believes one of his strongest points as a rider is dealing with slow hairpin corners, a feature of Le Mans - venue for this weekend's French Grand Prix.

But unfortunately for the MotoGP rookie, those same corner characteristics are also an area of weakness for his RC212V.

"I love this track - it is not a coincidence that I got my first 250 victory at Le Mans," said the Scot Honda rider, who beat then team-mate Andrea Dovizioso to victory in the 2006 event.

"In 250s, one of my best points was how to deal with the hairpins, but in MotoGP it's an issue we have still to think about because we need to improve traction when we are accelerating out of the corners.

"This is very important at Le Mans because there are many slow corners, so we will be working hard on this side of machine performance."

Takahashi claimed his best MotoGP finish to date with twelfth last time out at Jerez.

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