MotoGP Jerez: Espargaro pushing to banish ghosts and ‘unlock potential’

Repsol Honda’s Pol Espargaro had a MotoGP race to forget in Portimao as ‘ghosts’ of last season returned to plague his progress.

With just a matter of days between the Portuguese GP and his first home race of the season at Circuito de Jerez - Angel Nieto, Espargaro and the HRC collective have their work cut out to improve and banish the demons of old in favour of their preseason promise.

“The best thing to do after a hard race is to go racing again, so I am happy that we arrive straight away in Jerez,” the Spaniard said from home soil as the MotoGP paddock rolled into Andalucia. “We need to understand what our situation is in Jerez and work to overcome it, to show the speed we had before the start of the year.

We are not satisfied and surely I think overall Honda is not satisfied,” he said of the RC213V’s performance last weekend as Marc and Alex Marquez completed the rollercoaster race in sixth and seventh with Espargaro two places back in ninth. “We finished the race very close to each other and the result is that we were very, very slow.

“We were having problems that we thought we solved in the preseason as we were very, very fast but like all ghosts, they are coming back and we do not understand the situation so much. It’s time to try to understand, to figure out why this is happening and just turn toward the situation and Jerez is a good place to start.

“We are turning much, much less than the others,” he continued, elaborating on last Sunday’s issues. “We are locking the rear in the entry of the corners and we are not able to stop the bike in the correct place to make the bike turn. Then on the acceleration we are struggling because we do not have drive grip. So it’s kind of a general problem that we had last year