Pol Espargaro: Huge shaking on the straights, pumping, spin

Pol Espargaro battled some 'huge' energy-sapping shaking from his RC213V on the way to a disappointing tenth place in the Dutch MotoGP race.

With team-mate Marc Marquez climbing from 20th to twelfth on the opening lap, the Repsol Honda riders were briefly in formation.

But while Marquez continued his rise to an eventual seventh place, Espargaro was left 8-seconds behind, in tenth.

"[Early on] the bike felt heavy and I did quite a lot of mistakes, which over the race distance probably cost 3-4 seconds just by going into the green in the change of direction and then, yeah, we had a problem. I don’t understand exactly why, but huge shaking on the straight, like pumping a lot, quite a lot of spin," he explained.

"Sure the soft rear tyre didn’t help, but the pumping was huge and I was struggling quite a lot to control the pumping and as the race went on I got super tired and couldn’t manage to be consistent like the other guys.

"The others were just full throttle on their bikes and I was struggling to stop the bike [from pumping] in the straight and then again and again and again until you get super tired.

"The last laps I saw I was a little bit far from Taka and I just rolled and finished the race in P10. For sure far from what we want."

Espargaro confirmed that, like Marquez, he had been racing with the new prototype chassis.

"I cannot tell you [the exact difference] because we would need to race also with the same chassis we started the weekend with," he said. "It wasn't 'wow', but also we don’t know if this pumping was related to the electronics or to the soft tyre or to the chassis. We need to analyse more data and discover what's going on."

Electronics can be a cause (or solution) for the scary pumping experienced by Espargaro.

"We were playing a little bit different than Marc in the electronics. Every rider is different and this is super sensitive to each rider," Espargaro said. "So yeah, I think we did a mistake with some electronic set-up for this pumping but anyway at the end it is what it is.

"Now we need to think about the next race in Austria and just recharge the batteries in the summer break."

Espargaro starts his first summer break as a Honda rider holding twelfth in the world championship, with a best race finish of eighth, and equal on points with Nakagami.