For Alex Rins, the Aragon Grand Prix is his home race, as his family roots are no more than a dozen kilometers from the Teruel track. At MotorLand, the Suzuki rider has consistently achieved good results, including a stellar victory in 2020. However, in a year when nothing seems to be going right for the Hamamatsu manufacturer, the Spaniard has failed to go beyond the ninth place.
And this was precisely his position on the starting grid after another difficult qualifying session. From there, Rins started on the attack to recover positions in the first two corners, but when he reached the third Fabio Quartararo ended up on the ground in front of him after bumping into Marc Marquez and Alex had to avoid him, going off the track and losing many positions. . The Suzuki rider therefore found himself 16th at the end of the first lap.
From then on, Rins tried to impose his pace and outrun as many rivals as possible. On the fifth lap he was already 13th, on the tenth lap he had risen to 11th place and on the 17th lap he was already ninth. In the end he crossed the line in the same group as Jorge Martin, Luca Marini and Johann Zarco, just 47 thousandths of a second behind the French Ducati Pramac.
“It was a chaotic race,” commented Rins on Sunday afternoon at the MotorLand. “After crossing the first sector in last position, the truth is that climbing back to ninth was quite positive,” he summed up.
“At the pace level I’m happy, because we showed what we were working on: if we take our best twelve or thirteen laps of the race, we have the third best pace. So it was a shame to have to go out into the gravel to avoid Fabio. But these are racing, let’s see if we will be luckier next time, “he said with resignation.
Rins was just behind Quartararo when the Frenchman crashed in the third corner.
“It was tremendous, I didn’t have much time to react, I’m lucky I didn’t hit him because I was very close to him. I didn’t see Takaaki Nakagami’s fall so close, I was last at about a second or a second and half from the penultimate, I saw that there was a mess but I could not understand what had happened “.
Since it became known on May 2nd that Suzuki will leave MotoGP at the end of the year, the season has become a bit meaningless for the riders of the brand, who have already been placed in other teams for next year. . Despite this, Rins says he is still motivated for the remaining races.
“The motivation is the same as when we arrived in Aragon, that is to try to fight for the podium. I think we have the level to do it, if the first lap mess hadn’t happened I think we would have got on the podium, but now we have to think about the next race “, said the Barcelona driver.
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