Aegerter gets closer, Mulhauser struggles
Always in the front in every free practice session, Thomas Lüthi (Garage Plus Interwetten) will start the Moto2 Grand Prix of Qatar on Sunday evening from the fourth row of the starting grid (10th fastest in qualifying). Tom and his team, who wanted to test one final set-up for the race, unfortunately lost too much time in the pits. Even worse for his teammate: when he went out with a new set of tyres, he got held up in traffic during his last two laps. Fifteenth (fifth row) on the grid, Dominique Aegerter (carXpert Interwetten) scraps another few tenths of the gap that separates him and the leaders. Robin Mulhauser (28th) was completely lost this Saturday. A sum up from Frédéric Corminboeuf, the boss of the Swiss structure: "Tom's 10th position is a huge disappointment, but it is only the first qualifying and we have eighteen races. We decided, after a long discussion, to try a final bike set-up for the race but it did not work. To put Tom's Kalex back to the set-up from free practice cost us a lot of time. The objective was to prepare for the race and I am sure that Tom will have a word to say in it. Dominique's position is quite decent; with a good start he can be immediately in Top-10 and then we know he will hang onto them. Robin's situation is more complicated. We had a long discussion last night and this morning to convince him to change quite a few things in his riding style. If he was more in the front, we would never allow ourselves to do this during qualifying but here, I believe that it was the moment. Now Robin has to digest it all."
The first Grand Prix of the 2016 season will start at 17:20 Swiss time.
They said...
Dominique Aegerter (carXpert Interwetten, 15th): "The day was quite positive. Obviously I am not where I want to be but the gap is getting smaller, although not as quickly as I would like to. For the moment I am only making small steps forward. We are working on it with the whole team. We still need some time to put everything into place; I certainly have a particular riding style but so does Lowes, for example. He is also not as smooth as Zarco, Rins or Tom. if you brake too late on this circuit, it is not to your advantage; I absolutely need to remember this."
Robin Mulhauser (carXpert Interwetten, 28th): "Yesterday and this morning I had an open discussion with the management of the team and my whole technical team to identify what is wrong. We decided to use this qualifying practice as another free practice for me to try another riding style. I tried it but the track changed quite a bit form yesterday and I was lost. I did not know what to do anymore. I really need to rethink the foundations of my riding style because riding like this gives me no satisfaction. But we are going to get there!"
