Bassani: "I want to battle for the podium, not top five", Oettl under "pressure”

Axel Bassani says being without his crew chief for the Aragon WorldSBK round made it ‘impossible to have a good feeling’.

Robert Jones

25 Sep 2023

Axel Bassani, Ducati WorldSBK Aragon 2023

Bassani's struggles were a big surprise as he couldn’t manage better than P19 come the end of Friday practice at the Spanish round.

As expected, Bassani improved as the weekend went on but it wasn’t the type of performance he was happy with after being towards the sharp end in recent races.

Without his crew chief for the weekend, Bassani eventually found a good rhythm in Race 2 as he claimed fifth.

Speaking about his weekend, Bassani said: “It was impossible for me to have a good feeling with the bike, I had no feeling with the front on corner entry, it was closing every time.

“In Race 2, I tried to arrive to the end to get good points from the Championship. We tried a lot of things.

“After a weekend like this, it's a really good result but I want to battle for the podium, not the top five.

“Without my crew chief, it was difficult to work and I missed a really important person in my box, maybe the most important person in the box.

“It was difficult to explain to the guys in the box what I feel. I hope he's with us at Portimao and we work normally. This weekend wasn't a normal one as we didn't do the test, this track isn't my best and we were without a chief engineer."

From one Ducati rider to another, Philipp Oettl had one of his strongest weekend’s of the year as he claimed three top eight results.

However, it’s not likely to be enough to stay with Ducati as Andrea Iannone is expected to replace him at GoEleven Ducati.

With no concrete plans for 2024 as of yet, Oettl added: "After the summer break, we had three top ten finishes and now we just work calmly.

"I have a lot of pressure because I don’t have a job for next year. I feel very free because I will find something good. It’s a very interesting period because it’s very late in the season to have nothing.

"There’s a lot of talk but there’s nothing. I don’t know where I go. On one side, you can say it’s a very unsure future but in the summer break I was thinking a lot about the mindset, and I think I found something that helped me.

"For me, it was clear there was a rider change for next year. I understand them and now I focus on myself.

"I’ll try to get results to try and be interesting to some other adventure or teams. My main target is to stay in WorldSBK and I would like to find a competitive seat."