A challenging Sunday for Team HRC at Most
Autodrom Most
A challenging day for Team HRC riders Alvaro Bautista and Leon Haslam at the Most Circuit in the Czech Republic, the Spaniard scoring a ninth- and a tenth-place finish, while the Brit closed the races in thirteenth and eleventh place.
At 11am local time Bautista and Haslam lined up to begin the short Tissot Superpole race. From eleventh, the Spaniard ran a consistent race, lying tenth for the best part of the 10-lap sprint before moving up into ninth in the final stages, a position he then held to the line and that moved him one row forward on the grid for Race 2. Haslam was in tenth through the opening stages but fell back a little throughout the course of the race, crossing the line thirteenth.
Lining up for race 2 later in the afternoon, the HRC riders started from the third (Bautista) and fourth row (Haslam) of the grid. The British rider made a strong start, moving up into seventh, a position he held through the first half of the race, while the Spaniard found himself in eleventh. On lap fourteen, struggling with some pain from a small injury to his right shoulder, Haslam dropped back to tenth, just ahead of his team-mate. The two Team HRC riders then swapped places in the final stages, Bautista crossing the line in tenth position, Haslam right behind him in eleventh
At the end of this sixth round, Bautista now lies eleventh in the standings with 84 points, Haslam thirteenth with 68. Team HRC will be back in action in a two-day testing session in Catalunya the next week (12 and 13 august) before heading to Navarra for Round 7 set to take place over the weekend of 20-22 August.
"Today was a difficult day for us in the sense that this morning, in the warm-up, we tried a slightly different set-up but in the end it didn't give us the feeling we were hoping for and so we went back to what we had in Race 1. I made a decent start and finished ninth, earning a spot on the third row for Race 2. This afternoon unfortunately I had a bit of bad luck through the first turn because I got caught up in a race incident involving other riders and although I managed not to fall, I slipped a long way down the field. I recovered a little ground after that and was able to lap more or less with the times of the first five or six riders, but not faster than them so I could not close the gap. This is our limit, if we start well, we can stay with them but if we are behind, we never catch up. Having said that, I want to thank both the team and HRC because I know they are working hard and doing their best, but we have to take a big step forward if we want to fight for the positions we are aiming for.”
“We didn’t change much on the bike today, but I tried carrying out a few different experiments throughout the race. We made a good start in race 2 and I was in a good battle with Sykes for P6/P7 and felt quite comfortable. But over the last eight or nine laps I had a problem with my shoulder and it was very difficult for me to brake effectively. So not a good situation with this small shoulder injury, and a little disappointing too, because through the first part of the race that was the best I’ve felt all weekend. I felt more at ease and know we had the potential to fight for sixth or seventh, but instead we closed eleventh.”
