Maverick Viñales 6th and Aleix Espargaro 14th in difficult Sepang race

Team SUZUKI ECSTAR riders Maverick Viñales and Aleix Espargaró scored sixth and 13th places under difficult weather and track conditions during the Shell Malaysian MotoGP™ at Sepang today.

Following a 20-minute delay on the start because of a heavy tropical storm, making racing too dangerous, Viñales – who was fastest in the morning’s ‘dry’ warm-up – and Espargaró both had good jumps on the start, moving up into the leading places.

Espargaró was in the fight for fourth position until running wide and dropping down to 13th, so spent the race trying to catch-up, while Viñales lost some places at third-race distance before gaining some after a couple of riders slipped-off.

Maverick Viñales:
“Although sixth place is not so bad, I’m disappointed with the race result. We had a very positive weekend and I performed very fast in the dry, I really had hopes for a podium and also for a victory, but unfortunately in wet conditions we are not competitive yet. We struggle to find a good configuration with the electronics, which makes my riding very hard, in particular when it comes to acceleration. I can’t feel confident with the traction control, therefore resulting in me riding very carefully as I didn’t want to incur a high-side that could prevent me finishing the race. We have made many improvements on the machine and now we have reached a positive competitiveness in dry conditions, but the progress we’ve made in the wet is not enough. This result also proved the positives of the last three races; they were at three completely different circuits and we’ve proved we can adapt and be strongly-competitive in any kind of layout. Now the objective is to have the same competitiveness no matter what the weather conditions.”

Aleix Espargaró:
“I’m disappointed with the final result because the weekend overall had been positive, but then in the race I couldn’t feel competitive. I decided to go with a soft rear tyre, hoping the conditions of the track would stay wetter, but at the end this proved to be the wrong choice. From the very beginning I realised that my performance was not good and I lost the feeling with the grip right after four-or-five laps. I also made a couple of mistakes, and doing them at the very beginning of the race, when all the riders were still packed together, meant I lost many positions and then it was really hard to recover. It’s a pity, we’ve made a lot of progress in the last few races and I felt very competitive in dry conditions, but we still need to improve our capability to have the same performance also in the wet.”

Source: Suzuki