The Motorcycle World Championship return to the United Kingdom again brought mixed feelings for the Repsol Honda Team, who celebrated another podium for Andrea Dovizioso, but also felt the disappointment of Dani Pedrosa´s eighth place. The Italian rider managed to maintain the consistency which he has been exhibiting all season to climb one more step on the podium, while the Spanish rider – who suffered a fall yesterday in qualifying and another in warm-up this morning -, was eighth.
The problems of the veteran Dani Pedrosa were soon evident, starting from third position without one of his perfect starts – arriving at the first turn third -, he tried to show his cards in the opening moments of the race. At the second turn he overtook De Puniet and, moments later did the same to Lorenzo, managing an ephemeral leadership which only lasted a few more turns. Before the first lap was over, the problems for the Repsol rider were apparent who, after a few sudden shakes of his Honda RC212V, was overtaken by Lorenzo´s Yamaha.
Without giving up, Pedrosa again positioned himself first before completing an interminable first lap but, he went wide and was overtaken again by Lorenzo, and also De Puniet and Dovizioso. The Repsol Honda Team Spanish rider defended his position a bit longer but was progressively overtaken, lap by lap, by Hayden, Spies, Simoncelli and Stoner. He finally crossed the finish line back in eighth place, hindered by a bad choice in the tyre combinations of his Honda RC212V.
His Repsol Honda Team-mate, the Italian Andrea Dovizioso, did not make a perfect start either but managed to maintain his grid position and, after positioning himself third, overtook De Puniet to finish the first lap second. Lorenzo got away and headed straight for victory alone, De Puniet and Dovizioso entered into an intense battle for second place which lasted almost the entire race. Hayden and Spies had caught up behind but Davizioso managed to keep a small advantage over them and secure his final second place, a position which allows him to be placed second in the overall standings and mount a serious campaign in the fight for the title. Following the fifth 2010 MotoGP World Championship meeting, Lorenzo leads with 37 points to his advantage over Davizioso and 42 over Pedrosa.
Dani Pedrosa, 8th at 15.313 sec. >> Audio
“Well, eighth is obviously a disappointing result because we were looking quite strong here yesterday and I was confident. However, we were lacking some grip from the beginning of the race and we couldn’t replicate the pace we were able to achieve in practice. The rear was spinning and sliding quite a lot and the front was pushing which meant that, even though I was pushing really hard, I wasn’t able to maintain my pace. It was frustrating because I could see the riders in front and I could stay with them but it was impossible to fight for position. The one positive thing from the weekend is that even though I had two crashes I wasn’t injured and I didn’t feel pain during the race today. This means we can quickly put this weekend behind us and move on to the next races – the first one being Assen next weekend. I’d like to thank the team because they worked reall y hard this weekend and had to rebuild the bike twice”.
Andrea Dovizioso, 2nd at 6,743 sec. >> Audio
“I’m really happy with second in the race, and we also have second in the championship now so this reflects our strong start to the season. In the middle of the race I saw many riders were closing in behind me and so I tried to push at 100 per cent to get a gap and try to avoid a fight on last lap. Corners 13 and 14 towards the end of the lap are really slow and you can see clearly the riders that are behind, and also here it would be easy to be overtaken on the last lap if they were too close, so it was important to get a gap, which I managed to do. I’m so pleased with the season so far and I’d like to say thank you to Honda and to the team for the work they are doing. We still need to improve so that we can battle for race wins, but we are one step closer today and it’s a good result for us at the start of a busy period of races. Next stop is Assen and we must move forward again so that we have a chance of winning there”.
