Lack of front end confidence holding Kent back

Danny Kent admitted to MCN that Friday at Aragon was “a tough day” but is confident that he can improve his fortunes ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying session. Kent struggled with a lack of front end feel during both sessions and finished the opening day sixth fastest with his title rival, Enea Bastianini, setting the pace.

“It was a tough day to be fair because I don’t have a lot of confidence in the front end at the minute and here there’s a lot of hard braking areas,” said Kent. “We’ll have to look at the data to see where we can improve because we’re not far off at the minute but a tenth here and a tenth there is what we need. I don’t like seeing myself down in sixth place and it’s even more frustrating when you see Bastianini fastest. I just didn’t have confidence on the front end when the bike is banking over and you’re trail braking into the corner.

“Here there’s a lot of corners where you have to carry the brake into the corner and I’m losing a lot of time under entry and if I lose that confidence on the entry it means that we’re losing on the exit. It happens when I want to be aggressive and brake into the corner and the front closes on me. We’ll sit down tonight and my crew chief will see what we can do and I believe in him and it’s worked all year so I think that we can improve it for tomorrow.”

With a healthy 55 point title lead Kent knows that he doesn’t need to win races for the rest of the year to claim the title but even with such a commanding lead he is still focusing on winning races when possible. This has been his mantra throughout the year but now he has the added cushion of knowing that he can afford to lose 11 points each weekend and still claim the title.

“We’re confident and I’d much rather be 55 points in front with five races left than 55 points behind. The pressure is on him but he’s been dealing with it well so far and we know that we have the pace to win races. We’ve done the hard work already and now if we lost four points to him over a race weekend it’s ok. We can afford to lose ten points to him in every race and still win the championship. My plan though isn’t just to sit with Bastianini; I want to win races. I won’t take stupid risks to win races and there’s times that it’s going to be best to just sit behind him and take the points.”