Jorge Lorenzo was left disappointed as tyre problems prevented him from scoring a potential season best finish at Aragon in what continues to be a tough maiden campaign with Honda.
The three-time premier class champion has struggled to make a breakthrough with the RC213-V having joined the team from Ducati, and currently sits 19th in the championship having scored a best result of 11th at Le Mans in May.
He then broke his back in a fearsome crash during FP1 for Dutch TT at Assen, forcing him to miss four races and further preventing his progression.
Lorenzo has struggled to get up to speed since returning to action at Silverstone, managing only a pair of 14th places at the British race and at Misano last weekend before struggling in the latter stages of the Aragon contest to come home 20th ahead of only Hafizh Syahrin’s Tech 3 KTM.
Lorenzo said after the race that he thought he could get within his target of 30 seconds of the winner, but quickly ran into rear tyre problems and began to drop back through the field.
“Well it looked like at the beginning I could hit my target of being within 30 seconds of the winner, because I made a good start and for the first 2 or 3 laps I was quite competitive and it was the best pace I had all weekend,” explained Lorenzo.
“Unfortunately I started to feel the rear tyre dropping quite a lot, even if I tried to manage the consumption on the rear being really smooth with the throttle it was getting worse so I had to drop the pace a lot, around a second a lap, and eventually all the riders got me one by one and I fell back to the last group.”
Lorenzo’s tough weekend was made slightly better by breakthroughs made with the electronics of his Honda machine that have allowed him to ‘flow’ the bike more than he has in previous races.
“There were some positive things that we learned about the electronics and other settings this weekend that allows me to flow the bike better, so hopefully the next tracks we can find a way to generate more grip on the rear.
“With the standard setting for the moment the rear tyre hasn’t got much grip, so you have to find a way by changing lots of settings to find it as I can’t push 100% if I have no rear grip.
“It’s hard because this weekend I hoped to make another step, I didn’t have much time between Misano and here to recover and be able to get closer to the 30 second gap target, and I simply couldn’t keep the pace.
“Magical things won’t arrive that will allow me to suddenly win races from being 1.5 to 2 seconds slower, it’s a case of having the patience to improve little by little and find bits in different areas to get closer and finish the race more like we did at Qatar and Le Mans, around 10 to 15 seconds behind.“
