Repsol rider finishes just 0.034s off the podium and less than 0.3s behind the race winner. Teammate Enea Bastianini crosses the finish line in 16th position.
In the opening round of the 2017 Moto3 season, Arón Canet took a positive fourth place at Losail. The Spaniard just missed out on the podium, whilst his teammate Enea Bastianini placed sixteenth.
Canet, eighth on the grid, was tenth on the first few corners and Bastianini, who took off from eighteenth position, gained a position on Lap 1.
The furthest down the order Canet would drop would be on Lap 6, when he was tenth in a group of thirteen riders. On the antepenultimate lap, he was up into second.
Bastianini rode the entire race in the second group. Two laps from the end he was twelfth, but he dropped five places in a racing incident at the end of the start-finish straight and would only gain one back before the chequered flag.
Enea Bastianini
16th at 16.943 sec
“We can be satisfied with how the bike worked, because I managed to feel better, especially at the end of the race. I felt much better with used tyres and, as happened to me last year, we will have to try to find the way to work with the new tyers. On the first few laps the others managed to enter the corner much stronger than me -and for me it was really difficult to overtake. I wasn’t able to get close to the front group at any time and I was in the second group until the end”.
Arón Canet
4th at 0.252 sec
“We are happy with this result, because we have achieved the goal we had set -which was to be in the front group and finish in the top five. I wanted to be on the podium, but it was also important to keep learning and score points. We have taken a big step forward over the last year, as I am able to ride in the front group and maintain the position without struggling. I was missing some grip with the rear tyre, so I knew that whilst I could keep in the slipstream, it was difficult to overtake. I managed to position myself in a good spot coming up to the last straight; I tried to overtake Jorge Martin but I couldn’t get out of the last corner fast enough to overtake him before the finish line”.
