Iker Lecuona: Hungarian WorldSBK “not my day” for first win

Iker Lecuona says it wasn’t yet time for him to win a WorldSBK race for the first time at the Hungarian Round.

Lecuona entered the Balaton Park World Superbike weekend hopeful that the stop-start layout of the Hungarian venue would provide him an opportunity to take the fight to Nicolo Bulega for race wins.

Bulega, though won all three races while Lecuona had a poor qualifying, a grid penalty, and finally a lack of late race pace in the final race, finishing second in all three races for the third round in a row.

A chance seemed to appear for Lecuona on the opening lap of the Superpole Race when Bulega was buried in the pack and the Spaniard was second behind only Lorenzo Baldassarri, but a red flag for an incident between Miguel Oliveira and Andrea Locatelli ended those hopes and Bulega led from lights-to-flag in the shortened, restarted race.

“It was 100 per cent real,” Iker Lecuona said of his chances to win the Superpole Race before the red flag, speaking to WorldSBK.com after Race 2.

“So, yes why not. But in another side – okay, racing is racing, that start happened and someone pushed him wide, it is what it is. 

“Honestly, I expect that my first victory is like face-to-face with him in a ‘real race’, fighting with him all the race and then winning. 

“For one side, I don’t want to say I’m not happy about not winning, but on the other side I say it was not my day.”

Lecuona had been sick on Thursday which cost him energy on Friday, and physical issues held him back again in Race 2, in which he was within a few tenths of Bulega for most of the race before falling back by 2.5 seconds in the last laps.

“I struggled a lot Friday with my energy because I was sick Thursday,” he said.

“I need to say that in the short race I needed two laps more, that for the red flag we don’t have it, to catch Nicolo [Bulega] because I go a bit faster mid-race to the end and I catch a lot with him. 

“In the long race I said ‘Okay, to be with him, maybe I can try just to be with him’, because I have a really good performance. But the reality is that the last seven laps I started to struggle a lot physically because I cannot recover as much as I want the energy between the short race and the long race. 

“So, I struggled a lot, I made some mistakes, I almost crashed a few times, I almost go straight in the chicanes. 

“I said ‘Okay, that second place is not the result that we want, but in any case it’s perfect for the championship, it’s perfect for the team, perfect for me’. 

“Another second. Let’s work, that’s it, let’s work, because every time I jump on the bike I catch Nicolo a little bit, so we are happy about the performance.”