Distant third place “the best possible” for Alvaro Bautista in Italian WorldSBK Race 1

Aruba.it Racing Ducati’s Alvaro Bautista finished in what on paper is a solid third place in Race 1 at the Italian WorldSBK, but that came with an 11-second deficit to his race winning teammate Nicolo Bulega.

The Spanish rider started well from fourth place on the grid, immediately moving up to third place in the opening metres off the line, but from the outset he was losing time to Bulega and Toprak Razgatlioglu ahead of him, even as they battled over the lead.

Bautista explained that he didn’t know what to expect in the race; having crashed three times on Friday he was without any race simulation prior to the start, and so he hadn’t felt how the tyres drop over the course of a race distance, or how that would affect the characteristics of the bike.

“For sure, today I can smile a bit more [than Friday], even if yesterday I was not 100 per cent unhappy because the feeling with the bike was there,” Bautista told WorldSBK.com after Race 1 in Italy.

“For Superpole, I felt quite good, but for the race distance yesterday I was not able to do a long run so I didn’t know what to expect for the race, especially for the tyres and for the bike behaviour.

“So, I did the best possible, especially efter yesterday when I had a lot of crashes. We found a technical issue and today we could resolve it so fortunately we came back to our standard space and everything was working well today.”

The two-time World Superbike Champion said that he found it difficult to push in the early laps, which allowed the leading two riders to escape.

When he saw the size of the gap behind him to fourth place, he then decided to focus on finishing the race, having crashed out of Race 1 at each of the last two rounds.

“In the race, in the first few laps, I struggled a lot to to push the bike in the corners – with more weight and more heat it’s more difficult and I was struggling, and after a few laps Nicolo [Bulega] and Toprak [Razgatlioglu] were quite far,” he said.

“I just tried to survive; I saw the distance to fourth [place] was too big so I just tried to survive – it’s two races that we didn’t finish on Saturday so today it was important to finish, also after yesterday.”

Bautista added that he felt he could improve for Sunday’s races, but that he was unsure if those improvements would be enough to improve his result.

“I think we have some areas to improve for tomorrow,” he said, “because today I felt in the race a bit of a limitation, so we will try to improve for tomorrow.

“I don’t know if it will be enough to be with [Bulega and Razgatlioglu], but we will try.”