Plaguing Aprilia: Vinales and Espargaro Voice Concern Over THIS Issue
Aprilia riders Maverick Vinales and Aleix Espargaro struggle with braking issues at the Austrian MotoGP the team must address to…
In a return of heat troubles, all Aprilia riders had to endure a grueling race at the Malaysian Grand Prix. Espargaro’s race was a “nightmare” from the start, he said, adding that the heat left his bike’s engine sluggish and nearly uncontrollable toward the end.
“Extremely difficult for us and even more when you start that far back on the grid,” Espargaro commented. “I could not overtake anybody, and the engine was very slow due to the heat.”
“I suffered a lot. In the last three laps, I almost couldn’t make it until the end. I couldn’t even handle the handlebar – it was amazing, the heat.”
Starting from a lower grid position seemed only to fuel the issue for Espargaro. “Not at all,” he responded when asked if the temperature issue improved at the back of the pack. “It’s even worse when you are at the back of the grid.”
“This morning, I felt strong in the warm-up, but at the start it was impossible to recover places. No way to overtake. The bike was very, very slow. I started very, very low and on the last three laps I could not even brake because of the [tyre] temperature.”
Raul Fernandez faced similarly intense conditions, coming close to retiring as the race dragged on. He described his difficulty handling the bike in the final laps, forced to pull his head out of the bike’s slipstream in desperate attempts to cool down.
“I was very close to [retiring]. It was super difficult to manage with the temperature on the bike,” he shared. “I couldn’t overtake… But the last four laps, I couldn’t lie on the bike! I was all the straight with my head out of the bike to take some air.”
“But it’s really difficult, especially when you have a slipstream, you don’t take air, so you cannot [cool] the body a little bit. I don’t feel the hand. I don’t feel the foot.”
Rflecting on his and Espargaro’s experience, Fernandez pointed out that it’s following other riders on track that’s the biggest problem for the Aprilia’s heat issues.
“I think Maverick did a good start and all the race without a slipstream. So he was alone. Maybe for that reason he did more or less the [normal] race.”
“But in my case and Aleix, we were in the same group. I had four slipstreams, four bikes in front of me all the race, and he had three.”
