Andrea Iannone finally scored his first points for the Suzuki Ecstar team this weekend when he moved up from his 11th place on the starting grid to finish 7th in the third round of the 2017 MotoGP championship, the Americas GP.
The race day started off better than Saturday's qualifying. The tarmac's temperature was higher and this allowed Iannone to immediately feel more confident in the warm up, and then to finalise a comfortable setup for the race.
Starting from the 11th place Iannone more or less maintained his position in the early laps, although struggling a bit to find a comfortable pace and to overtake. He was able to be more competitive in the second half of the race.
Lapping at the same average pace as the top 5 riders, he was able to advance several positions to end up in 7th place.
“I'm really happy because finally I got some good feelings back with the bike, but at the same time I'm not happy at all about the first part of the race,” the Italian rider said. “I lost too much time in the first 5 laps, and then it was hard to recover from that. Afterwards, I found a good pace, but having already lost 6 or 7 seconds, it was too hard to recover any more than I did.”
“There will be a very important test we will do on Monday after Jerez, where we will try some different setup configurations that would be impossible to try on a race weekend. For sure this weekend, and especially this morning, we've learnt many things. They will be very useful to ensure we arrive in Spain well prepared.”
