Disastrous weekend after "Amateur" problems for Laverty

Eugene Laverty had a miserable weekend in Germany with the Irishman struggling en route to a 17th place finish. On Saturday Laverty said that a change of tyre warmers led to problems with tyre pressures for Friday and Saturday saying that it was “a bit amateur and I haven’t had a problem with tyre warmers since I was club racing. I’m sure that if I went in a white van with my brothers to a track we could get the tyre pressures correct.”

The team changed tyre warmer manufacturers on Laverty’s bike this weekend and the manner in which they heat the tyre is quite different. This led to calibration errors and left Laverty feeling that he was riding around on a flat tyre at times over the weekend.

A change to the older tyre warmers on Sunday at least let him have some confidence once the race started but with his weekend effectively restarting on the opening lap of the race it meant that he could do little during the course of the race. The situation was such that he set his fastest lap of the day on the final tour.

“It was strange today because I had more grip at the end of the race. At the start when I was off the gas it would break away and then when I got onto the gas it was sliding around. After half distance I started to feel more grip but that’s not how it’s supposed to happen. My last lap was my fastest so that shows that we have potential because to do that with a 30 lap old tyre was good but we need to address the balance so that we can be faster at the start. I knew that we’d have to do this because the new swingarm gave us a lot more grip so we need to balance it better and keep working to make a step.”

Finishing 17th, and 10s behind the leading Open Honda of Jack Miller, was a disappointment for Laverty who had expected to be stronger at Sachenring with the track suiting the Honda.

“It was a tough weekend and we were always chasing our tail. Even in morning warmup we still working on tyre pressures because it was going up and down. This really messed up our weekend and we only really started the weekend at two o’clock on Sunday so it really put us on the back foot. I made an average start but I followed Michael through at the start because he was good off the line and he opened holes for me.”