Yamaha rue Jorge Lorenzo’s wrong tyre choice in Brno

Jorge Lorenzo’s factory Yamaha team boss Wilco Zeelenberg has admitted the Spaniard’s front tyre gamble in Brno last weekend dealt a big blow to his hopes of successfully defending the MotoGP world title in 2011.

Lorenzo opted to run the softer compound Bridgestone front tyre in the Czech Republic race and it proved to be the wrong decision after the current world champion could only finish fourth.

With Casey Stoner romping to his sixth win of the campaign, Lorenzo surrendered 12 precious points and heading into the final seven races he trails the Australian by 32-points.

Explaining why Lorenzo had opted to run the softer option, with every other rider on grid selecting the hard compound front apart from Suzuki’s Alvaro Bautista, Zeelenberg told MCN: “We know the Brno track is hard on the front and as soon as you hear the rider wants to have the softest option, you have some doubt. You want to know if it will hold for the race and Bridgestone said yes. It did because our soft tyre looked better than the hard one Ben (Spies) had at the end of the race. But there was less braking and turning performance. That wasn’t the case during qualifying otherwise he would have chosen the hard one.

“That’s racing and sometimes it is not as obvious as you think it should be. We are racing with a bunch of guys with a lot of experience and normally we choose exactly the right spot. Of course we had our doubts because if you’re the only one then you have to think ‘have we made the right choice?’ But if the rider says he had a couple of big moments on the hard tyre then it is understandable why you choose the softer tyre.”

What made it worse for Lorenzo to swallow was he tried the hard compound option again during the post-race test session in Brno and Zeelenberg added: “We wanted to analyse what went wrong in the race and definitely the front tyre choice was not the best one we made. Somehow it worked in qualifying and also in the warm-up but not in the race and also at the test it didn’t either. As soon as we jumped on the hard one it turned and stopped better and he could do low 57s and even 56.9, and that is quite frustrating. It was a wrong choice but it is hard to understand why it worked on Friday afternoon in similar conditions. But the harder one was the better choice.”