The opening day at the spectacular Circuit of the Americas has been quite positive for the Reale Avintia Racing riders. Although these good feelings didn’t reflect in the timesheets, both Hector Barbera and Loris Baz were satisfied after the first two free practice sessions of the weekend.
Barbera came to Texas with one goal, to adapt his riding style to his Ducati Desmosedici GP16 requirements. In the final minutes of FP2 he was fifth, but eventually he finished the day 15th overall. He hopes to improve even more tomorrow and will try to fight for a place in Q2.
Loris Baz kept some tyres for tomorrow and spent the day working on his set-up for the demanding Texan track. He crashed out at the end of the day, but he knows the reason for his crash and expects to improve and get the best possible grid position in qualifying tomorrow.
“Today has been a positive day. As I said before coming here, I still need to adapt my riding style to this bike, but today I felt better riding my bike and my riding style is becoming more natural. We have to keep working in this way because I want to get the maximum out of the bike. I want to say a big thank you to my team, they have been patient and they managed to provide the necessary calm to reach our goal. We are still far from where we want to be, but I’m sure that we will get there sooner or later. Their support is really important and without it, everything would be more difficult.”
“The first day was more complicated that Argentina, but we are not so bad as it seems in the standings. This morning I didn’t want to use the soft tyre at the end of the session and I did the 45 minutes with the same set of tyres, which gave us valuable information for the race. In the afternoon I improved my pace riding on my own and the feeling was good. At the end we mounted a new soft rear tyre, but didn’t change the front as I wanted to keep one set for tomorrow. I knew that this combination would push the front. Braking into turn one I made a small mistake and I crashed. I hope to improve tomorrow in FP3 to try to get into Q2.”
