Mixed fortunes for Vazquez, Martin and Moncayo on rainy first day at Aragon
The rain was again the main protagonist on the first day of practice for the Aragon Grand Prix at Motorland. The JHK T-Shirt LaGlisse riders Efrén Vázquez and Adrián Martín improved little by little and worked on the setup of their FTR-Hondas with one eye firmly on the qualifying tomorrow, which will likely be wet again.
In the morning both JHK T-Shirt LaGlisse riders crashed when they hit a patch of oil on the track, but neither of them suffered any consequences, physically or on the bike. In the afternoon with a lot more water on the track, Efrén finished the session in 14th behind Maverick Viñales while Martín ended the day in 18th, despite riding with a broken scaphoid bone in his left hand.
Less fortunate was Andalucía JHK T-Shirt LaGLisse rider Alberto Moncayo. In the morning session he struggled a lot to find grip on the rear of his bike and in the afternoon it was even worse. In the end he also had a small crash, but both himself and the team work hard to solve the problem ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying session.
#7 Efrén Vázquez, 12º (2’15”150) “It’s been good, because despite the crash this morning on the oil, we stayed on board in very tricky conditions. In the afternoon the feeling with the bike wasn’t bad, but this is a track which sometimes hampers me a little because of my size. There are places of acceleration without cutting the gas, blind corners… And what I see is, compared to other riders who have the weight very static on the bike, like Adri, they can have the weight on the front and the rear. For me to achieve that I have to move on the bike, so I struggle more. But despite that I’m happy, because I have a good pace and I could have improved a little more. Tomorrow it seems it will rain some more, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens, make the best of every practice.”
#26 Adrián Martín, 19º (2’15”920) “A lot of rain. It’s been a testing day, because I didn’t know very well how far I could push with the hand here. So I took it calmly, because a crash wouldn’t be good for us. But still this morning we had a silly crash because of the oil on the track, but fortunately my hand is okay. We have to go little by little and tomorrow we’ll try to be a little more ahead. The bike still needs to improve a bit in the setting and also the speed. If we can do a good job today, I think tomorrow we can be further up, because I like the rain, I feel comfortable and the hand also doesn’t hurt quite as much. Therefore I think we can get a good result.”
#23 Alberto Moncayo, 20º (2’15”984) “Today’s been a difficult day, because we couldn’t find any conclusion from it. We are lacking grip on the rear which complicated things for us and the worst is that we couldn’t find out why. To top it off, with three quarters of the second practice done I had a crash. The problems with grip started in the morning, but even though we made several changes, this afternoon with more rain we still had it. The crash was out of the corkscrew, very slow, without throttle and above all pointless. Now we have to analyse all the data and let’s see what happens. I don’t think the track is the issue, because people are going fast. We’ll work to solve this and let’s see how it goes tomorrow.”
Source: LaGlisse Team Press Release
