The winner of the 2019 Grand Prix of the Americas made a blistering start from seventh on the grid to move up to fourth through Turn 1, before moving up to third on the opening lap.
But his fight for the podium did not last long as he quickly lost ground and finished fourth 11 seconds behind race winner Marc Marquez.
Rins stated that he had traction problems throughout the race, which prevented him from “fighting”, and he could not explain why he had this problem.
“I think today was a very, very difficult race for me,” said the Catalan on Sunday. “I suffered a lot because coming out of the corners we lost a lot of time. I don’t know if it was the rear-wheel drive, the aero package or what, but I couldn’t fight.”
“I’m happy with fourth place, but I would have liked to finish on the podium. I was missing something in the race.” I had a hard time keeping up with Fabio [Quartararo] and the Ducati. We lost a lot of time coming out of corners. We have to keep working. We have collected a lot of data for [the factory in] Japan during this race, to improve our bike for 2022 . That is all. We have to finish these three races in the best possible way.”
(Before reading on, click on the link or on the photo to see the photos of Álex Rins at the 2021 MotoGP Americas GP)
“We came very close to running the hard front [tyre] and the medium rear [tyre], but in the end we saw that most of the drivers used the soft rear. So, to go with the same weapons, we used the soft rear.
“[The bike] wasn’t too bad [over the potholes]. I felt the potholes a lot, and with the traction problems I tried to survive. The potholes were for everyone.”
His teammate Joan Mir had similar traction problems in Sunday’s race and saw the checkered flag in seventh, although he was later penalized one position for a final lap bunt with Jack Miller.
The Balearic did not understand the sanction, since he says that he was forced to touch due to Miller’s “strange” lines in the curves”. In any case, with that result the possibility of revalidating the title mathematically vanished, since now He is 78 points behind the championship leader, Fabio Quartararo, with 75 remaining to be played in the remainder of 2021.
