Concern and a warning sign. Maverick Viñales is alarmed by his poor performance at the British GP and showed this throughout the weekend. In Sunday’s race, the scenario was even worse, with the rider not hiding his concern.
Analyzing his riding, the Spaniard again mentioned problems with tire wear, which was extremely pronounced, and when asked if there was a difference between tire types – hard, medium – he clarified: ‘To be honest, we never expected this degradation on the medium tire because on the first day, on the 14th lap I rode in 1:59.4s, with a lot of traction, and then in the race it was five laps and it was completely gone. It’s hard to understand, we have to understand and see what happened. Maybe we need to work differently in training sessions, maybe do more laps in a row to see what the degradation level is and four laps are not enough and we really need to solve this problem because I don’t see that [the others] have improved much, I see that we are slower’.
On whether it was effectively an improvement by Ducati and a drop by Aprilia, which is failing to keep up, Viñales is of the opinion that the problem lies solely on Aprilia’s side:
– It’s hard to say. I don’t think they’ve taken a big step, to be honest, we’ve just slowed down and I’m not riding as fast as I can. We’ve lowered our level. In 2022 I did 1:57.7s in qualifying [1:57.865s specifically, was second best, only behind Johann Zarco] and this year I did 1:58.1s [1:58.137s] and I crashed, and this is not normal. We are certainly slowing down and we have to regain the potential we had at the beginning of the year. We have to see, I don’t know how, but we have to see.