Top ten does little to satisfy Bautista; ‘this isn’t what we are aiming for’

Team HRC endured a mixed round four of the 2021 WorldSBK championship as Leon Haslam secured his best result of the year, while Alvaro Bautista was off the pace throughout. 

Bautista’ finishing position in both feature races (8th and 10th) was by no means a disaster, however, the speed shown - or lack thereof, was surprising as the Spaniard was two and sometimes three seconds off the pace during the weekend. 

Sunday was the ‘best day’ in terms of feeling for Bautista, as a 37 second gap to race one winner Toprak Razgatlioglu was reduced to 22 seconds for race two. 

But still, a position of tenth was clearly not what he expected, especially with Haslam competing for the podium in two out of the three races. 

Bautista said: "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 today, but our gamble with rain tyres in the sprint race didn’t pay off.”

"In Race 2 we actually improved our pace over the course of the 23 laps and were able to achieve a top ten finish, but honestly this isn’t what we are aiming for. 

"We need to improve from here on in, because we really want to be doing better of course."