Aegerter still struggles
The second day of free practice for the Grand Prix of Qatar on the circuit of Losail, close to Doha, was difficult for the Swiss Moto2 world championship delegation. There was only one free practice session scheduled for the Moto2 class and the five Swiss riders this Friday. The day was mixed for the Swiss: Thomas Lüthi (Derendinger Racing Interwetten) was the only one to save the situation. What was positive for the former world champion was the difference between his and the best times of the day - signed by British Sam Lowes like yesterday - as he improved from 1,4 to 1,1 seconds. Dominique Aegerter (24th) and Robin Mulhauser (28th) are much more far off. Frédéric Corminboeuf, the boss of the three riders said: "Robin lost the first two sessions on Thursday for technical issues and now he has to get back into it. But he is doing his job. Tom is going the right direction. Today he confirmed what we said yesterday already that with him the primary objective now is to find a more comfortable bike for him so he feels even better. I am happy with the way Dominique Aegerter responds, even though he is still far off, in the second half of the session he made a progress and we could see that he was a bit less stiff. We know that Domi needs to ride a lot to free himself on the bike and it is clear that from our three riders he is the one who suffers the most from the lack of our winter preparation due to the weather conditions. We have a very efficient technical staff, we are going to find a solution."
And what they said ...
Dominique Aegerter (Technomag Racing Interwetten, 24th): "I am quicker than yesterday.. but so is everyone else, which means that my position in the classification is still not satisfactory. I have to move forward and the bike too, I cannot reach the limit yet. Given these circumstances, with a lack of confidence, it is impossible for me to free myself on the bike like I'm supposed to. We worked with two different set-ups today and some things were better with the second one but some were not. Since we only had one session (45 minutes), it is very difficult to do big changes of set-up - this is what we should have been doing in the past couple of weeks but the weather was against us. Personally I just need to stay focused, I know that we have what it takes to get out of this situation."
Robin Mulhauser (Technomag Racing Interwetten, 28th): "To me, because of the problems we had on Thursday, it feels as if we started our weekend off this evening. I was finding it hard to get back into it, I felt strained. This improved towards the end and we started to make two or three changes on the bike. I improved my lap times from last year already but I know that we have a lot of work to do with the set-up before qualifying on Saturday. Today I rode with a "raw" bike, tomorrow I will have a race bike!"
