12.09.2022
World Superbike Championships continued with their 2nd races in its seventh round in France on Sunday. We cannot be sure whether the leader of the World SSP class Dominiques Aegerter (Yamaha) read our ramblings on Saturday or not, but there was no cure against him on Sunday - the Swiss finished first and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Not Jules Cluzel (Yamaha), not Nicolo Bulega (Ducati) or anybody else. Aegerter continues to dominate the scoreboard after the 7th round, beating Lorenzo Baldassari (Yamaha) by 19 points.
Dynavolt Triumph rider Stefano Manzi showed his true colours, finishing seventh after his initial 16th position at the start. Hannes Soomer did not fare so good - he took a fall in the first lap because of a technical failure. The handlebar was bent so bad after this belly flop that it was not possible to continue racing. Later Hannes explained what had happened: “When I switch gears down the bike’s ”brain” gives a command to accelerate first. This time the gear switch did not happen, so I was speeding head first into a curve and the front wheel just disappeared from under me.”
“This is really unfortunate since we were on the right track with changes we made in the morning, and we could have competed for higher positions than we did on Saturday - Stefano proved that,” said Hannes. “Today’s results reflect our lack of testing days since for some reason we could not use the pause in races to tune our bikes. We have a fast bike that can be handled well, but which needs to be fine-tuned in several aspects to be fast from the very beginning of the race weekend, not only on the last day. But we are moving in the right direction.”
The next, 8th round of World Championship races will take place in two weeks in Spain (September 23-25).