Hot Superstock Race for team KTM Maehr in Misano.
The fifth from ten races in the FIM Superstock 1000 World
Cup ended better than the twenty fifth place than the 14-lap
reflected for the young Austrian René Maehr and his
two cylinder KTM 1190 RC 8.
Maehr had already found a good basic chassis setup for his
KTM in the first training session on the 4.18 km long, very
curvy racing circuit on the Adriatic, even in temperatures
of 35 degrees Celsius. And in the hot Italian summer temperatures
the 21-year-old student was able to reduce his training time
in the decisive last session on Saturday by a second. With
the real aim of gathering important experience with the newly
launched RC8 in very tough racing conditions, Maehr went into
the heat of the Superstock battle at twenty eighth of 40 riders.
Early race incident
After some of the crash incidents in the opening stages that
are so typical for this very hard fought class, the KTM rider
was able to overtake some of his four cylinder opponents and
finished the race in 25th position. In doing so he was able
to put in important test kilometres and gain more valuable
experience with the first ever Austrian Superstock racing
motorcycle.
What Rene Maehr said after the race
Rene Maehr: "It's not easy to coldly evaluate such a
tough race. The 25th place at the end of the day did not really
say much about the advancements we were able to make as a
team over the weekend. Thanks to a clearly improved basic
setup we were able to massively reduce our time in training
by 1.5 seconds. I had some bad luck when a crashed bike slid
directly in front of me at the beginning of the race. I had
to brake hard a swerve to miss it and this immediately created
a gap between me and the next group. In this class, that's
not possible to narrow over only a few laps. To get right
to the point: I am pleased that we could work so well in this
extremely hot weather and not have any problems; also that
we could significantly improve our speed, especially in the
corners. I am not that happy with finishing at place 25 but
we will be working to improve on this!"
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