VALENCIA: Anthony West will start the last race of the season from the 23rd spot on the grid.
The 33-year-old Australian was able to repeat lap times in the low 1.36s with high consistency, but wasn’t able to improve further. Whenever he tried to push himself and his bike to a new limit, he ended up struggling with the same mid-corner handling issues that he had noticed on the first day of practice at Valencia.
In the warm-up session, West and his crew will try another change to the set-up in order to be better prepared for the race.
Spaniard Roman Ramos, West’s partner in QMMF Racing Team, had a disappointing qualifying session in which he clearly missed out on his previous best time from the third free practice session on Saturday morning. Even though he is down in 33rd position on the starting grid, he will still try everything to put on a good show for the Spanish fans at his home Grand Prix. “I can do this lap time quite often, but I am finding it difficult to go any faster than what I am now,” said West. “The bike just won’t allow me to turn in the middle of the corner and I am having a lot of trouble with this. We improved the rear grip, which is good, but the bike is never in the right position in the corner to open the throttle and to make the best use of this additional rear grip,” he added.
Ramos was dissapointed on teh day’s outcome.
“We started highly motivated and things worked really well in the third free practice session, where I was half a second faster than in qualifying,” he said.
“For whatever reason, we didn’t succeed in qualifying and didn’t even come close to repeat the same lap time. We are not happy, also because we are quite far behind the guys I normally fight with. I don’t have high hopes, because I never found a good rhythm.THE PENINSULA
