Points for Pol Espargaro in Texas

The KTM RC16s of both Bradley Smith and Pol Espargaro lined up next to each other on the fifth row of the grid for the twenty lap dash around the long, arduous and bumpy COTA layout. Espargaro had to work to make ground from fifteenth. From lap eight the KTMs had a great tussle for a mid-pack slot until Smith’s choice of a medium front tyre resulted in #38 having to slow his pace. Pol guided his #44 machine to 13th and a second points-scoring classification in a row that leaves him 14th in the young championship standings.

Pol Espargaro:

“It was hard to change direction and hold these big bikes here! Each corner is hard but I think we did a good race and had a good weekend overall. Maybe we could have improved the setting a bit more because we were quite far from the others and this means we were ‘different’ and making some mistakes; I think we paid for that front tyre in the race. Overall I think we must be happy, we can take these three points and go back to Europe with more experience. I’m happy to go to Jerez because for these three races outside of Europe we don’t have that much info or data and it’s tough. We’ll go back and we’ll have Mika (Kallio) there to help us.”