Reale Avintia Racing riders Loris Baz and Hector Barbera will start tomorrow’s Spanish Grand Prix from the seventh row of the grid after qualifying in 20th and 21st place today.
Loris Baz finished the day quite angry because he was not able to recover the good feeling he had during the private test in November where he was second with a best lap of 1’39.184. Obviously, the track temperature was not the same and Michelin introduced new tyre compounds since then, but Baz still expected to be stronger in the 15 minutes qualifying session today. He now will test some modifications during the warm-up session and he is confident to score points in tomorrow’s 27-lap race.
Although it does not reflect in his grid position, Hector Barbera ended the day with quite positive feelings following the drastic changes made last night on his Ducati Desmosedici GP16. His team worked to modify his riding position on the bike to improve the feeling with the front, which was his biggest nightmare since the season started. He expects to confirm these positive feelings tomorrow and build his confidence for the future.
“Today was a difficult day for me. The bike is really hard to ride and we are still missing one second from the pace we had during the winter test here. The feeling is a problem when I try to push harder, the bike does not want to turn and it has been tough so far. We will see if we can improve during the warm-up, but I don’t know if it will be enough to have the pace to avoid being at the back of the field.”
“This was a tough session. We modified the set-up of the bike, but I don’t get feedback from the front tyre. Since I got on this bike I’ve never been comfortable. This morning we changed my position on the bike and I started to get a better feel for the front end. I hope this change will make a difference for the race result. We will never give up. We have already bottomed out and from where we are now, we can only go up. I want to say big thanks to my team and to my sponsors for there work and mainly for understanding this situation.”
