The ninth championship appointment saw the Pramac d’Antin riders participate in the DUTCH TT event at the Assen circuit in the Netherlands.
Despite predictions, it was a dry race that enabled the Italian-Spanish Team to obtain important points for the Championship.
Both Alex Barros and Alex Hofmann achieved top ten results finishing the 26-lap race in seventh and eighth places respectively, but despite the good results, neither rider was completely satisfied and had hoped for better results.
Brazilian rider Barros, often a protagonist at the Assen circuit, made a mistake on the first lap and endured some difficulties with his riding style and the bike feeling, which meant he was unable to achieve the desired race performance.
The same could be said for the German rider Alex Hofmann who had hoped for more after a strong qualifying result and race set-up.
Alex Barros (7° classified – 43’13.224): “Sincerely I’m not very satisfied for my race. I hoped to do something better on this track. I started well, but at the first turn I lost the trajectory and I went off the track a bit, maybe this happened because tyres were still too cold. From that moment my race became more difficult, furthermore I was not very confident to ride, in contrast to what I felt yesterday. Today the big problem was when at the exit of the corners, where my bike widened trajectory a lot, maybe because of the wind; already this morning, during the warm-up, we had this problem, we tried to resolve it, but we weren’t able to work on this perfectly. Now I want to look at the next race in Germany. For me Sachsenring is a good circuit and I hope to be able to get a better result. ”
Alex Hofmann (8° classified - 43’18.917): “The eighth position is not too bad, but we looked for something even better. My race start was good despite the clutch giving me little problem that made me nervous; for some minutes, I thought we could see a repeat of what happened in Jerez that prevented me from finishing the race.
But this wasn’t my real problem; after some laps, when I had a good race pace, I started to have cramps at my right arm that made it impossible for me to ride as I would like and difficult to overtake under braking, two very important things in this circuit. The things that make me happy is that I had good feeling with my bike all weekend and that the package Ducati-Bridgestone and my Team worked well. ”
Luis d’Antin - Team Manager: “I can say that I am only partially satisfied, in fact both Barros and Hofmann obtained the top ten, but the result could have been better if they were to be more aggressive in the opening laps of the race; I think that this compromised the possibility to finish higher up. At the same time, looking to the next races, we are confident because all the material at our disposal is really competitive. ”
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