Laverty looking towards Texas after electronics woes

Eugene Laverty was left curing his luck at Qatar but the Irishman is looking forward to next weekend’s Grand Prix of the Americas in Texas. Making his premier class debut Laverty’s pace in practice and qualifying suggested that he had good consistency for the race and that he may have been able to make an impression in the Open class.

However an electronic problem left him riding a machine that had lost track of its location and he was forced to ride a bike that “Didn’t know what country it was in never mind what corner I was at!”

“There was very little I could do about it from the beginning – it was a disastrous race,” said Laverty after the race. “There was some confusion with the electronics – the bike didn’t know where it was – so the job was fucked from the start! It was just a suffering 23 laps, and not a great MotoGP debut after a faultless weekend. With a bike that didn’t even know what country it was in, that was all I could do.”

Laverty eventually wound up finishing in 18th position, eight seconds behind his Aspar teammate Nicky Hayden. The problem also affected Jack Miller in qualifying so it could be something that Honda needs to look into given that the Open class bike has changed considerably over the past 12 months with a much more powerful engine. Laverty summed up how difficult his race had been by saying:

“We need to find out why it did it, but in some places where it thought it was in first gear it was in fourth, so we were coming out onto the straights with no power, having to short shift to fifth. It felt like having the handbrake on in a car! The engine braking was up the left too – nothing was working. It was challenging, because every lap was different.”

Looking forward to Texas, a new circuit for Laverty, the Irishman said that it was one of the rounds that he’s been excited for with the circuit looking like a real challenge to get the best out of.