Cycle News Staff | April 22, 2012
For the second race in a row, Kenny Noyes needed a last lap pass to take third place in the Spanish National Moto2 Championship. This time the American, who suffered a huge highside crash during qualifying, found that his tire choice was the wrong one and had to battle with his sliding Suter over the final laps, just managing take third by .033 of a second with draft pass.
While the tire was working, Noyes was running the same pace as the leaders.
After round two, reigning CEV Champion Jordi Torres, who took his first win of the new season, leads second-place finisher Alejandro Mariñamarena by two points and Noyes by just three. Opening round winner Dani Rivas crashed out of fifth with four laps to go, and drops to fourth in the championship.
Now the team, led by crew chief George Vukmanovich, will have valuable time for testing and familiarization with the Suter machine that they ran for the first time just days before the opener in Jerez. Round three at Motorland, Aragon, is a month away.
“That was tough,” Noyes said in a team release. “The weekend started well with a good pace in the dry on Friday, but it rained in both qualifying sessions and I didn’t get enough heat in the tire at the start on the first session and, man, did I get some big air! My HJC helmet took care of me and the team did a great job getting me back out there just in time to save myself from a last-row start. I managed to qualify fifth on the basis of a single flying lap and that was a good thing because conditions were much worse in the second qualifying session. I got an awful start in the race and then things got a lot worse when Syanrin ran into me and knocked me off the track. By the time I got back by Riva and Syanrin into fourth, the two leaders were gone but I managed to pull back two seconds on them and got by Ramos into third. Then the tire just went off, dropped off a cliff, and I was a sitting duck for Ramos, but when he did get back by on the last lap, I was able to stay with him, sliding all over the place, and I got just enough drive out of the last corner to come out of the draft and beat him by a wheel. If we knew the bike a little better and had had some dry time on Saturday we´d have run the hard rear tire that the other guys used. These first two races could have gone a lot worse for us. Now we have time to work. Nothing is easy in the CEV, but we got the bike and the team to win races and fight for the title.”
