Eighteenth place start at Valencia for Alvaro Bautista

Alvaro Bautista, a bit behind his Aprilia Racing Team Gresini team mate in search of the best setup, finished ninth in Qualifying at Valencia today (with 1’32,282), which places him in the 19th spot on the starting grid.

For both riders the grid position will be bumped up by one place due to Valentino Rossi starting from the back of the grid. Bradl will therefore start from 13th place, still on the fifth row, whereas Alvaro moves up to the sixth row and the 18th spot on the grid.

ALVARO BAUTISTA
“These were difficult qualifiers because I was only able to test the settings this afternoon which I then used in Q1. Now we need to see if this setup will work well for the race. We’ll also need to read all the data well, figure out what is positive about these settings and then make the right choices for the race. We will need to work in the warm up session as well, but both yesterday and today I did better in the morning – when I was able to put in my best times easily – than in the afternoon, and obviously the risk there is that the pre-race session may not be very significant.”

Source: Aprilia