Bimota looks stunning in full flight
season. Montella’ s teammate Alvaro Bautista never really found his groove and, whilst he did improve steadily as the weekend progressed, qualifying in 15th didn’ t set him up well and 10th in Race 2 was the best he could muster. The extent to which his injuries from Autodrom Most are still affecting him isn’ t clear but Bautista isn’ t performing to expectations at the moment.
BIMOTA / KAWASAKI The Bimota team of Alex Lowes and Axel Bassani have been, by far, the best non-Ducati entries this year and so it was at Donington. Lowes qualified in 7th and held that position in Race 1 whilst Bassani qualified in 8th, dropping a place in the race to Kawasaki’ s Garrett Gerloff who was surely looking for some redemption after a poor showing at Misano. The Sprint Race saw Lowes finish in 4th and Bassani in 5th, results which promoted them to row 2 of the grid for Race 2 in which Bassani was able to pass Lowes for 4th place late in the race. Lowes may have been exercising a little caution at that stage, not wanting to incur a penalty after testing the margins of the track enough times to receive a track limits warning from race control. Garrett Gerloff’ s Donington weekend was a vast improvement over the horrors of Misano and saw him finish each race, having improved on his grid position. 11th in qualifying was unremarkable but converting that to 8th in Race 1 and 9th in the Sprint Race set him up well for Race 2 where he finished in 6th. Any remaining demons from Misano were thus suitably exorcised. These results saw the Kawasaki-powered contingent, remembering that the Bimota is at its heart a Kawasaki, score in every race across the weekend, the first time they’ ve managed that this season. This puts Lowes, Bassani and Gerloff in 4th, 6th and 8th places respectively in the championship. Montella now leads Lowes by 29 points which is a good buffer but with 12
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