Tough outing for the boys in blue
Back in Portugal, only Jonathan Rea had scored more points than Pata Yamaha’s Toprak Razgatlioglu and Michael van der Mark. Come Aragon, the boys in blue jettisoned a hatful of points. Despite maintaining their respective third and fifth positions, the Turk fell from 33 to 65 points off the lead as the Dutchman went from 54 to 79 in arrears at the championship’s halfway point. Feeling under the weather on Friday and Saturday, Toprak’s maiden front row at Portimao was long forgotten as he slipped back into old habits and managed just 11th on the grid in Aragon’s cooler temperatures. Sixth, seventh and eighth place race results were not in the script. Van der Mark salvaged a rostrum in the tenlap Sprint Race but was fifth and sixth in the pair of 18-lap encounters. Aragon has never been Yamaha’s finest track. When the World Superbike website entitled a video ‘What went wrong for Yamaha on Friday’, Team Principal Paul Denning responded via Twitter with: ‘We had a good day. What went wrong for you, @WorldSBK?’. But were his riders satisfied with their weekend results?
In a perplexing interview, van der Mark declared: “In the final race, I passed Scott Redding initially but Johnny’s pace was too much. As soon as the grip dropped I struggled even more than yesterday. It was a long and tough race. Unfortunately, a lot of guys passed me, but we should be really happy with the weekend.”
‘As soon as the grip dropped I struggled even more than before’