Luca Marini had a good Saturday in Buriram. The Mooney VR46 rider placed second on the grid at the MotoGP Thai Grand Prix and then managed to finish third in the Sprint.
If the winner Jorge Martin proved to be out of his reach from the first corners, behind the Madrid native Luca put on a good fight with Brad Binder’s KTM, which in the end got the better of him. However, for the Marche native it is the second consecutive podium in the short race on Saturday (it was not held at Phillip Island due to bad weather), which confirms a good moment in terms of speed, despite still being recovering from the operation on his left collarbone.
And to say that already yesterday, but also after qualifying, he had hinted that he was not expecting an easy Sprint, given that the behavior of his Desmosedici GP with the medium rear tire does not satisfy him. It is therefore normal that he was asked if his approach had not only been pre-tactical.
“I was fast, but not enough, because in the end Martin was going much faster. Since the beginning of the weekend he has had something more and I was referring to this when I said that I wasn’t happy with the average on the rear. Even when Binder passed me, I thought I had a little more, but I lack grip on the edge and the bike moves a lot on the medium. This is why I feel better with the hard, because by moving less I can accelerate better when exiting corners,” Marini told Sky Sport MotoGP.
At the start he was quicker than Martin and took the lead for a few metres, before handing it back to the Spaniard at the first corner. From the outside it may have seemed like a sign of surrender, but in reality there was a carefully planned strategy behind his move.
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Luca Marini, VR46 Racing Team
“Actually, I made a good start as always, but it was Martin who got it a little wrong. I didn’t expect it, because he usually always starts like lightning. I thought of my strategy to attack from behind to Jorge not to make a mess and leave. Such a hot race, if you can break the group and be alone, it’s much easier”, he explained.
“If you are fighting in all the corners, the tire temperatures rise too much and it becomes very difficult to ride the bike. More than anything else, it was fine for me to be second at that moment: I wanted to try to stay close to him to attack him at the end, but he had more. Even if I had turned first at the first corner, he would have passed me. He’s very fast, so he would have found a way”, he added.
In the next phase of the race, in his opinion the only way to keep the podium was to defend himself from those who attacked him, even if this allowed Martin to take off and fly alone towards victory.
“At the beginning I tried to push as hard as I could, but I wasn’t able to go any further than that with the medium tyre. Behind were Binder and Aleix who tried to pass me from all sides and I closed everything down. Jorge then ran away even more , but maybe if I hadn’t defended myself I wouldn’t have even managed to make the podium, so that’s fine.”
The positive note of the weekend is that the collarbone injured in India is now just a small annoyance: “My shoulder doesn’t hurt. Here the problem is only turn 4 and turn 5, because you need a lot of strength to push on the handlebars left and I’m suffering a bit. Even in qualifying, the corner where I was slowest was corner 4”.
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