Tougher race than expected for Rins in Le Mans

New Moto2 title leader Alex Rins says Sunday’s race at Le Mans was harder than he had been expecting – after a surprise appearance from a number of riders who didn’t factor in practice.

Spending the early stages of the race in a battle with Thomas Luthi, Simone Corsi, Franco Morbidelli and Takaaki Nakagami, the experienced Spaniard admitted afterwards he had to dig deep to break away.

“It was a tough race – harder than I thought it would be after practice. When Luthi overtook me, I passed him right back and thought we were going to have a fun race. But when I got the lead back, I saw we were in a group of five and decided to push hard.

“The group shrunk until it was only Simone and me – and I felt it was safer to stay in front and see what happened. At the end, I was able to increase my pace again for the win.”

While he might now be championship leader, though, some question that remains to be answered is where he’ll end up in 2017. Keen to move to MotoGP but insisting that he wants a factory seat, it still seems more likely that he’ll end up at Monster Tech 3 Yamaha.