Remy Gardner, son of 1982 500cc world champion Wayne Gardner, took the Moto2 title last year by beating Raul Fernandez in a great battle and earning promotion to MotoGP with the KTM Tech 3 team. rival for the title share the garage in the Austrian manufacturer’s satellite team, and both had a difficult debut.
After four races, between the two only Gardner has scored points, while Fernandez has only managed to qualify in the top 20 so far. The pre-season of the reigning Moto2 champion was affected by a broken wrist in training and this injury also affected the progress of the first races.
However, after finishing the Grand Prix of the Americas in 20th place more than 42 seconds behind the winner, Gardner reveals that he expected more from this start of the season: “To be honest, I was expecting something better, seeing what they did. others in the past and thinking about how we finished last year in Moto2 in such a dominant way. I’m honest, I expected more. The first few races were quite tough, I hope returning to Europe will bring me some stability. It was like a big slap in the face, that’s for sure. “
All the KTM riders struggled at COTA this weekend, as the particular track layout was not particularly congenial to the RC16, which instead had won in Indonesia with Miguel Oliveira and finished second in Qatar. Only Brad Binder managed to score points thanks to the 12th position, while Gardner hopes that the Austrian brand can learn from what went wrong at COTA.
“For KTM I hope they have taken something from here to understand how to improve the package we have,” Gardner said. “They have four riders giving their best and two fantastic riders in the factory team, but none of them scored points, we ended up at the back of the group despite giving 200% to every corner. I hope they have gathered some data since this weekend and that they can try to think of a way to go a step further. This was certainly not the easiest track for KTM, we have seen it in the past ”.
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