Jorge Lorenzo to start Assen race from 8th on grid

Jorge Lorenzo was unable to ride the hot Qualifying lap he had in mind at Assen today and will start tomorrow‘s race from eighth on the grid.

Lorenzo posted some very competitive times, but was unable to keep up his front row qualifying streak of four in a row. He started the Q2 session with an opposite approach to his usual strategy. This time he was the last rider out of the box, to be assured of some clear track space.

He briefly took provisional pole with a strong first flying lap of 1’33.146, before being pushed back down to fourth place. On his next lap he improved his time by 0.029s, moving up to third, and quickly returned to the pits for a new set of rubber.

He rejoined the track with a little less than six minutes left on the clock. The Spaniard posted a second fastest time of 1’33.044 on his next hot lap, before being pushed back to fourth.

He improved his time by two thousandths of a second on his next lap, leaving him 0.415s from the front, but it was not enough to keep him on the second row. He will start tomorrow‘s race from eighth on the grid.

JORGE LORENZO
We improved the bike a lot and I‘m very happy about this. In free practice four I was very competitive with a used tyre, but unfortunately I couldn‘t make a very explosive lap during qualifying. I rode four laps that were very similar, but not one was fast enough to be in the first row, so we are going to start from the third row for the first time. We still need to improve in some parts, because we are very fast in T1 and T3, but we are miss something in T2 and T4, especially during qualifying, but our pace is quite good in every sector. The challenge for tomorrow is to make a good start. The race is very long so the most important thing is that there won‘t be any rain and I think that with some patience we can little by little make our way to the top.

Source: Yamaha Racing