Qatar MotoGP: Ben Spies vows to bounce back quickly

Ben Spies is aiming to bounce back quickly from a torrid start to the new 1000cc MotoGP era after the Texan slumped to a bitterly disappointing 11th place in Qatar last night.

Two heavy crashes earlier in the weekend were followed by a chatter issue in the 22-lap race that saw the 2009 World Superbike champion drop quickly down the field on the factory Yamaha YZR-M1.

He eventually finished 11th having held off a brilliant late attack from top CRT rider Colin Edwards on the Suter-BMW and Spies said: “We just got to take the positives out of the weekend. I tested the air bag twice and it worked. That was good but that’s about it.

“We knew we had a problem in the warm-up, but I was hoping it was going to be fixed in the race and it obviously wasn’t. I feel we could’ve been up there and been battling with them, but there was just no getting around the feeling I had with the bike. We’ve got to figure out exactly what went wrong.”

Spies, who is expected to emerge as a serious title threat in 2012, is now determined to get his season back on track when the campaign resumes in Jerez on April 29.

He added: “We’ll go back to Jerez and hopefully have some new bikes that are working good. I’m confident with the bike when it’s working good. But we just need to get some stuff figured out and fixed for sure.

“It was good Jorge (Lorenzo) won. We can see the Yamaha is going good. I like Jerez and we had a good test there recently and feeling good.”

For full coverage from the Qatar MotoGP, see the April 11 issue of MCN.