Maverick Vinales explained that the reason for his fade in the British Grand Prix was because of having “pushed too much” trying to recover from a moment with Jack Miller.
The factory Aprilia rider showed strong speed in the early goings of the 20-lap encounter as he worked his way towards the front of the pack, though his charge was halted due to a run-in with KTM’s Jack Miller while going for fourth on lap three.
The Aussie started to fall back following a strong start that saw him slingshot into the lead, Vinales attempting to find a way through at the rapid Copse right-hander – though he ran wide and pushed Miller off with him.
The duo lost a significant amount of time with the moment, Vinales falling to seventh while Miller fell to 14th – though the former was still able to later catch the leading group once again such was his pace – though he later faded to fifth by the end after running out of tyre, something he feels occurred as a result of having to make up the time lost in his clash with Miller.
“I pushed too much in the middle of the race, I recovered the gap to the front guys and then the tyre was gone so I just survived until the end,” said Vinales.
“I’m happy for Aprilia we worked well all weekend, even from our side its really positive as we have solved the start problems as well as the first lap (lack of speed) so we can be satisfied.
“For me it’s been the strongest weekend of the season so far, we need to improve qualifying but we also need to be careful because our bike is always very good at this track so we need to be calm and see what happens in Austria.
“I’m in a good place, I’m in a mental place where I can attack which is fantastic because sometimes I’ll be more calm and waiting for later laps but now I’ll be pushing and trying to overtake.”
Vinales felt the reason for him running wide in his moment with Miller earlier in the contest was caused as a result of getting sucked in by the slipstream of Alex Marquez, who was running just ahead of the KTM at the time – a similar phenomenon experienced by Marco Bezzecchi who crashed out after getting caught in the slipstream of Francesco Bagnaia a few laps after.
“Alex (Marquez) overtook Jack (Miller) and I braked and got into the slipstream of Alex and struggled to stop, so the only thing I could do was go between them to avoid them and unfortunately Jack needed to go wide,” added Vinales.
“It was not a move I would normally do as without a rider in front I could have stopped the bike, and the only way to prevent a crash was to go between the two in front.
“I think I lost around three seconds with this that I had to recover for the rest of the race, but I felt the rhythm was quite good after.”
