Impressive seventh for Spies on Mugello debut

Strong weekend and good race reviewed by Spies

Sunday, 6 June 2010

Steady progress throughout the Gran Premio d’Italia TIM weekend for the Monster Yamaha Tech 3 rookie resulted in a top-seven placement in Sunday’s race. Team-mate Colin Edwards finished 13th in the fourth round.

Ben Spies got his 2010 MotoGP campaign back on track on Sunday with a strong seventh-placed finish at Mugello, bouncing back from consecutive DNFs in the previous two rounds.

The American, who had never ridden at the circuit before the weekend, learned its tricky layout admirably fast and qualified in seventh place. He then repeated that position in the race classification after a fine ride had seen him rise as high as fourth following after a superb start.

“The goal was top ten, so to be seventh I'm pretty happy with, especially leaving here with solid points after the disappointment of the last two races,” said Spies who had Casey Stoner, Marco Melandri and Randy de Puniet in his sights for much of the race. “I got a great start and felt like I rode as hard as I could and didn't make too many mistakes but I just couldn't quite get up close to the battle in front of me and that was a little frustrating.”

Spies is now excited about the next round at Silverstone, where he feels it will be even more of a competitive race. “It was what I needed to build my confidence and experience and now I'm looking forward to Silverstone. That's a level playing field with nobody knowing the track, so I'll have less of a disadvantage,” he concluded.

On the other side of the Monster Yamaha Tech 3 garage team-mate Colin Edwards was affected by a mystery fatigue which he first felt in the morning warm-up session. The Texan finished the race 13th and was dissatisfied after feeling strong on his M1 machine throughout the weekend.

“I'm really disappointed and a bit mystified because I've felt good all weekend and we got the bike working really well again after we switched back to the setting we had at Mugello last year,” said Edwards. “The bike was working well, but I can't ride in that condition. I felt fatigued really early in the race and was really struggling to change direction with the bike. I've had a bit of an arm pump issue all weekend for the first time in my career and needed quite a few injections to ease that. I'll try and figure it out and be ready to come out fighting strong in Silverstone.”