Round 05 #NLDWorldSbk
SUPERPOLE RACE & RACE 2

Team HRC has completed the fifth Superbike World Championship round at the Assen TT Circuit with Alvaro Bautista crossing the line fifth in race 2, to score his strongest result of the season to date.

The 10-lap Tissot Superpole race got underway at 11.00 am local time. Bautista made a strong start and was lying sixth before a crash unfortunately put paid to his plans towards the end of lap one.

Lining up for race 2 later in the afternoon, the HRC rider Bautista was lying ninth through the first turns. Alvaro gained a position in the early stages, passing both Lowes and Van der Mark to place sixth by lap nine. The Spaniard was able to lap quite fast and consistently to get past Rinaldi on lap fifteen and move into fifth place. He kept gaining ground on Davies, reducing the gap from 2.549 to 0.889 seconds before crossing the line to secure his best result of the season so far.

Bautista now places eleventh in the championship standings with 68 points.

Team HRC will be back in action during the sixth WorldSBK round at the Most Circuit in the Czech Republic over the weekend of 6-8 August.

Alvaro Bautista #19  

“Overall, it has been a tough weekend. On Friday we tried something different with the set-up just to verify a few things and collect some information, but it didn’t work as we’d expected so we went back to a more base set-up. Then yesterday, mixed weather conditions limited the time we had available to define the best set-up. In the end our best day in terms of feeling with the bike was “It has been a challenging weekend for us with two crashes in the first two races, something that quite annoys me honestly, because I think that our performance in those races could have been similar to what we did in race 2. For now, when I try to ride more naturally, I fall. Having said that, we finished the weekend with a positive result, a hard-fought top five, with some nice passes, and I think that this stems from the work we are doing. During the weekend we improved a lot on the electronics side, especially on the lower area of the throttle which gives me more confidence now. Maybe it’s not so apparent yet, but I hope it’s just a starting point for the upcoming races.”