WorldSBK Indonesia: Locatelli wants more, ‘we can improve a lot’

Andrea Locatelli left Mandalika third in the WorldSBK Championship standings after two podium celebrations on the Pata Yamaha in round two.

The question many people had in their minds at the start of a talent-packed 2023 season was which of the riders behind the headline-grabbing big three would step-up to challenge hardest this year. The obvious answer to this so far comes in the slender shape of factory Yamaha rider, Locatelli. And he does not even have the power to hand that the next nearest candidate for top three top baiter, Michael Ruben Rinaldi has.

He only lost second place in the championship fight to his teammate Toprak Razgatlioglu because of a fifth place in Race Two at Mandalika, but so far it has been three podiums from six starts.

“I prefer when we get the podium, but not so easy to put results in the Race Two,” Locatelli explained from Lombok. “It’s difficult to recover from the back. I lose especially on the first part of the second start. But basically a good weekend. No mistakes. Some riders do some mistakes, but this is normal.”

There were, in fairness to even an analytical rider like Locatelli, many things to take into consideration on a Sunday with two red flags, four starts, and crashes and injuries all around. And like many other, he had used up all his available tyres, and had to start racing with part worn Pirelli rubber.

“It’s not easy,” he agreed. “For sure with the tyre it was not easy also to take some choice sometimes, and also we don’t have a lot of tyres, so sometimes we need to restart with the old tyre. But we were in a good base setup. We were with a good choice of the tyre.

“In the end, in the second restart, we start from P7 and it was not easy to overtake the other riders in front