Alvaro Bautista recovers “disaster” French WorldSBK: “I started to feel much better”

The French WorldSBK weekend featured all of the typical elements of a standard Alvaro Bautista weekend in 2025, with incidents, crashes, a poor qualifying, and a late race charge forward.

The beginning of the Magny-Cours World Superbike weekend saw Bautista struggling for speed, then he missed almost all of FP3 with a technical problem before qualifying 14th in Superpole and being caught up in the turn 13 incident in Race 1 with Xavi Vierge.

But Race 1 was the moment things started to turn around for Bautista at Magny-Cours as he was able to get back out on-track after having his bike fixed in the pits after the crash to confirm some setup changes he’d made before the race.

“This weekend has been a bit tough for us because we had a lot of problems on Friday, the feeling with the bike was not the best, and we tried some tests,” Alvaro Bautista told WorldSBK.com after Race 2.

“Also, in FP3 I had a technical issue and I could not do the FP3. So, then in Superpole the setup didn’t help me too much to make one lap.

“Sincerely, before Race 1, the weekend had been a disaster.

“Then, we made a modification for Race 1, but I could not try exactly with the other riders because I had the incident, I had to stop in the pit.

“Fortunately, I can restart the race – for sure not to make some points, but I used the race like a practice to check the new setup. Sincerely, I started to feel much better with the bike, so I was quite confident for [Sunday].”

Bautista then continued in the setup direction from Race 1 on Sunday morning, but contact with Jonathan Rea in the Superpole Race resulted in another DNF and having to start 14th again for Race 2.

“In Warm Up, we made a step, bigger in that direction, but maybe we over-passed the limit and we came back a little bit for the Superpole Race and the feeling was not too bad.

“I did a good start, I started to fight very close to fourth or fifth place that was Danilo [Petrucci] – I was in that group. But I had an incident.

“In Race 2, starting from the back, the only thing I wanted to do is just finish, try to recover the good feeling with the bike.

“I started to feel not so bad, and, well, I did a lot of overtakes, I enjoyed it.

“At the end, fourth place is not the position we are fighting for, but, overall weekend, we have to mini-celebrate that position.”

He added: “We did a small adjustment in the setup and it allowed me to be consistent from the first lap [of Race 2]. I was in the group at the beginning, everyone is pushing, but when the tyre drops a little bit I think we have an advantage, I think I can manage better in that moment.

“Also, for sure, when the bike reduces a little bit the weight, for me it’s a bit easier to make direction changes, and in this track with these quick direction changes I felt even more than in other tracks.

“So, at the end, I started to feel comfortable. I had a lot of fight.”

The Spanish rider added that he felt he could’ve fought for the podium without the problems he had earlier in the weekend.

“I tried to not make mistakes, to not lose time, and maybe for that I lost a bit of time behind other riders, but even if I tried to pass them quick I don’t know if I had much more to catch Alex [Lowes] – I was catching him a little bit, but just small steps,” he said.

“In any case, I think that if I didn’t have the problem in the Superpole and started from the front, it was possible to fight for the podium, but this was the situation and we tried to get the maximum.”