Rinaldi reflects on Mandalika WorldSBK, ‘I need to be smarter’

While Aruba.it Ducati’s Michael Rinaldi was an odds-on podium finisher as WorldSBK rolled into Mandalika, the weekend didn’t go to plan for the determined Italian.

What looked like a nailed-on Race Two win suddenly became a probable second when a red flag was thrown and his teammate Alvaro Bautista caught and passed him with two laps to go of the restarted race. A late slip-up under braking on the final lap and Rinaldi went from second to fourth, snatching even a podium-shaped defeat from the jaws of near victory.

It had been a strange Indonesian weekend for the 27-year-old, building on podiums from each dry race at Phillip Island just a few days earlier, to have more than one major disappointment at Mandalika despite being one of the pre-race podium favourites.

Harsh, when he led the first part, and then 12-laps of the final (shortened) Race Two? Maybe not by Rinaldi’s new self-imposed standards, since he turned his training regime and overall approach to his day job around in the winter. Despite a clear set-up problem holding him over 50 seconds back from the race winning time in the very first (and very wet) race of the season at Phillip Island, Rinaldi was a podium finisher in the next two Aussie races.

Mandalika’s Race One was a disaster, as he fell at the first turn after going in too hot, then tagging the back of Axel Bassani’s MotoCorsa Ducati. A Superpole Race seventh was not in the script either (an engine braking problem did not help his cause) and as we now know his redemption in the lead of Race Two was only temporary.

Over winter testing it looked like Rinaldi would be ‘the’ rider to be able to split up the big three forces in WorldSBK, but the points table so far sees him behind Bautista, Toprak