After eleven successive wins since the start of the season, the Aruba.it Racing \u2013 Ducati team rider \u00c1lvaro Bautista was unable to extend his unbeaten record at the Autodromo di Imola, where this weekend the fifth round of the Superbike World Championship is taking place.
Starting from the front row with third place on the grid, the 34-year-old Spanish rider \u2013 and championship leader \u2013 was unable to do anything about his Kawasaki rival Jonathan Rea, and after 19 laps \u00c1lvaro had to settle for second place in the first race this weekend.
Team-mate Chaz Davies was unlucky today, despite starting from the pole slot after making major gains throughout the weekend. Totally at ease on the track where he has won a total of four times, the 32-year-old Welshman saw all his hopes of victory vanish after just four corners, when an electrical problem on the engine of his Panigale V4 R forced him to retire from the race, without him even completing one lap.
Tomorrow the ten-lap Superpole Race will be held at 11.00 CET, while Race 2 gets underway at 14.00.
\u00c1lvaro Bautista (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati #19) \u2013 2nd<\/b>
“For sure it hasn\u2019t been easy to learn the track in just a few sessions, and in addition the race pace today was very high. At the start I tried to follow Jonathan but I struggled to keep his pace. Nevertheless, I\u2019m happy because today we scored the best possible result. We didn\u2019t make any mistakes and in the end it was important to score good points for the championship. I\u2019m also happy because I think it was a good result to finish the race in second place on a track which was completely new for me until today.\u201d
Chaz Davies (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati #7) – DNF<\/b>
\u201cI\u2019m massively disappointed because I saw today as a big opportunity. I felt a big improvement with the bike from yesterday, the crew did a fantastic job and we made another step forward. I did a record lap in Superpole, was looking forward to fighting with Johnny and putting the bike on top of the podium. I didn\u2019t have a lot to lose but I didn\u2019t get very far. It seemed like an electrical problem, because the bike lost power coming out of turn 4 and Johnny overtook me. It\u2019s a pity, I\u2019ll try and get a good result tomorrow but the weather doesn\u2019t look so good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After eleven successive wins since the start of the season, the Aruba.it Racing \u2013 Ducati team rider \u00c1lvaro Bautista was unable to extend his unbeaten record at the Autodromo di Imola, where this weekend the fifth round of the Superbike World Championship is taking place. Starting from the front row with third place on the grid, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.6","language":"en","enabled_languages":["it","en"],"languages":{"it":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2224"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2227,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2224\/revisions\/2227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arubaracing.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}