Tricky weather conditions affected qualifying day for Andrea Iannone and his Suzuki Ecstar team at the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit on Saturday where he struggled to find the right touch with his GSX-RR in the rain and ended up in 12th position.
The 1'40.250 posted on Friday allowed him to advance directly to Q2, as none of the riders managed to improve on their performances in the morning's FP3 enough to steal his tenth place slot.
The rain came right before the beginning of FP4, thus allowing the crew to try their first wet setup, but the tricky conditions of the track were a gamble for Iannone: an attempt with the slick tyres unfortunately proved not to be the best option, and later there was not enough time left to make many laps with the wet tyres, resulting in his best lap of 1'50.725, the 12th of the pack.
“It's been a hard day for us, we are struggling, I weren´t able to be as fast as I'd like. I try to push, but I can feel many problems, and I don't have the needed confidence. Especially in the front, when I brake hard I feel unstable. We have to work hard to understand where the problem is that prevents me from being fast,” he explained. “I feel the tyres moving both in the front and in the rear, and also the rear spins when the bike picks up, meaning that the electronics have a lot to improve on.”
“It's an overall problem that gets amplified on the wet track. In dry conditions we are not so bad because the problems are more limited, and I believe we could have a good race tomorrow, if the weather were dry. Yesterday we had some ideas for a better setup that could give me a better touch with the bike, but unfortunately we couldn't try it today, so let's hope for a dry warmup and to find out if this intuition we had will be effective.”
