Marcos Ramirez 14th and Rory Skinner 18th in the #AustrianGP

This weekend saw the best result of 2023 so far for the American Racing Team as Marcos Ramirez took 14th place and two points whilst Rory Skinner finished with a Moto2 personal best of 18th in Austria.

Rory made good use of Friday practice to reacquaint himself with the track where he made his second-ever Moto2 appearance last year, improving by almost a second between FP1 and FP2 to finish 21st.

Saturday got off to a positive start as Rory boosted himself into 20th spot in the combined timings at the end of practice. After getting off to a good start in Qualifying 1, running in the top four for a provisional Q2 promotion, he struggled to put in a competitive lap towards the end of the session to finish 10th and line up 24th.

As the lights went out, Rory charged down to Turn One but attempting to avoid any more injuries, he took evasive action and dropped him down into 28th.

Putting his head down and focusing on moving forward, Rory steadily made his way into 19th by lap 13 before sweeping past Mattia Rato for 18th place where he ended the race, taking his best result of his Moto2 career so far and his first GP finish since Jerez after a luckless run of races.

Making his return to Kalex machinery after two years, Marcos quickly found his feet as he improved by half a second across Friday’s sessions to round out the day in 18th.

An impressive FP3 performance put Marcos onto the very cusp of a direct Q2 spot but the Spaniard missed out by the merest 0.007s. Unfortunately, as the track temperatures increased, he struggled to find the morning’s pace and he ended Qualifying in ninth to line up 23rd on the grid.

As the race got underway, Marcos made up three positions in the opening lap before making his way up a further two spots into 18th place.

Marcos stayed in the group contesting for the top 10 as he battled with Jeremy Alcoba for 12th place but was pushed back into 14th spot, where he ended the race.

Rory Skinner #33
I actually had a good weekend. I felt like I made a big step with my riding on Friday and Saturday, it was quite enjoyable to be somewhat competitive for once this year. We closed the gap to the front group, and even though the position doesn’t really reflect that, we were a lot closer.
Qualifying was a good session; we were there and competitive for the first half of Q1 but we struggled to put in a competitive lap towards the end when the tyre dropped off as we were on a one-tyre strategy.
In the race, I felt like I had decent pace to be up there and competitive with a lot of them but I kind of got a bit spooked off the start as I was going to get ‘Alcoba’ed again at Turn One which wasn’t ideal and after Mugello and Silverstone, the last thing I wanted to do was pick up another injury, get wiped out and have my race cut short.
It’s nice to get a race distance under my belt; it’s a PB result but it’s a bit bittersweet. It’s nice to have brought it home and get laps under my belt so we can move on from that in the future and hopefully continue in the way we did at the beginning of the weekend.

Marcos Ramirez #24
This weekend was super positive, coming back to the Kalex and the team after a really hard first half of the season not scoring points and then scoring two points is fantastic.
I know I can do more but, during the race, I saw the crashes and I struggled a bit with the front so I stayed safe as I wanted to take some points on my first race back with American Racing so I’m really happy and I like how we worked throughout the weekend so we start from here and next weekend, for sure, we will be better.