PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE
Jorge Lorenzo is now the championship’s underdog, which sounds a bit crazy considering he’s the defending World Champion and on a factory Yamaha. But the pair on the Repsol Hondas – Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa – are proving tough to beat, especially rookie Marquez, the young Spaniard who is having a fantastic season so far and leads the championship by 26 points after winning his fourth race in a row (and fifth overall) last weekend at Brno.
After coming back from the collarbone injury that sidelined him at Sachsenring, Lorenzo has been riding hard to try and close the points gap that is now stretched to 44 points. Unfortunately for Lorenzo, no matter how good a start he has been able to get – as seen at Indy and last weekend at Brno – Marquez and Pedrosa have been able to chase him down and beat him.
So with two third-place finishes in a row and with one of those being at a “Yamaha track” at Brno, it’s tough times right now for Lorenzo.
“Yes, I try,” Lorenzo responded to the question asked in today’s pre-race press conference at Silverstone. “You know, I try to win races because it’s the only way to recover the points that we lose after Assen, after Sachsenring and all these things happening in the past. But for the moment its not possible, no. For the moment it’s not possible, ‘til Brno. Let’s see how it goes here at a different track. Maybe we have something more. But we have to wait for tomorrow to see what happen or on Saturday.”
Also considered a Yamaha track, Lorenzo has a great record at Silverstone with two wins there in the premier class. And with the race happening a few months later in the year than in the past, the weather is expected to be much warmer.
“Yeah the weather is okay,” Lorenzo said about the outlook for the weekend. “So to be in England is a nice thing. Maybe the weather keep like that all the weekend. So we can have a dry race with sun. It is wonderful to race here with this weather.”
Also the big question that the MotoGP world has been waiting on – is there any news on the new seamless transmission?
“No,” Lorenzo said. “No news. Unfortunately.”
To try and come back to what Lorenzo and anyone who follows the championship knows, he is going to have to start beating Marquez. But Lorenzo wanted to voice that he was focused on his task at hand – winning races and not championship pressures.
“For this moment we must focus to try to win races and forget about the championship,” Lorenzo said. “We are still not in the level that I expect to win the race. But things can change suddenly, maybe this weekend. So we don’t have to lose the motivation, the willness and this is what we are working right now.”
Again the question was asked – how tough was it to keep the motivation when you are riding so hard and not able to win? Lorenzo had a World Champion response.
“There are tougher things in life,” he said.
Time’s running out in the season. And Lorenzo needs to try and get the wins at tracks that play to the Yamaha’s strengths. Trying to flush out some desperation from the cool, collected Lorenzo, he was asked if he felt that Silverstone was a must-win situation.
“No,” Lorenzo said. “It’s a normal race like another one. And It’s true that now I have not so much to lose. So we’re going to try to win.”
