Team Meeting
limitation. Whilst Bulega likely gained from the Sprint race red flag, Lowes was clearly one of the losers.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE CRASH? The basic anatomy of the crash was that Lowes was holding a tight line through turn six and Locatelli squeezed into him leaving Lowes nowhere to go, Loka bounced off Lowes, went down and took out the back end of Oliviera’ s BMW. Lowes appeared to take a hard knock to the handlebars and immediately looked at his wrist but didn’ t fall. Loka went down, remounted and continued. Oliveira rag-dolled and was motionless in the middle the track( fear not, he was injured but not seriously). Cue the red flags. After a short delay, the Superpole race was re-run over eight, rather than the scheduled ten, laps but Lowes and his team hadn’ t noticed that the gearshift on his Ducati had been damaged in the collision. The effects of that surfaced after the race restart and compromised Lowes ability to race to the extent that he dropped right back to nineteenth position and out of the points. Even worse news was that finishing outside of the top nine in the Sprint race dropped Lowes back to eleventh place on the grid for race two. Again, he did extremely well to recover something from the mess of the weekend and took out sixth, but the fates really weren’ t on his side in Hungary and, consequently, he came away with less points in his pocket than he might have expected or deserved. Lowes’ woes provided an opportunity for Miguel Oliveira to challenge for third place in the series but it wasn’ t to be. Oliveria came out of the Sprint race in worse shape than anyone else. After a storming run in Race One to take out third place, the Superpole
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