Rins believes it would have been a podium without having to dodge Quartararo

September 19, 2022

For Alex Rins, the Aragón Grand Prix is his home race, since his family roots are no more than a dozen kilometers away from the Teruel track. In MotorLand, the Suzuki rider has always had good performances, such as the stellar victory in 2020. However, in a year in which nothing seems to be going right for the Hamamatsu structure, the Spanish rider could not finish more than ninth position.

And that was, precisely, his position on the starting grid after a complicated new classification in the previous one. From there, Rins came out like a shot to recover positions in the first two corners, but when he reached the third, Fabio Quartararo, after touching Marc Márquez, went to the ground and Alex had to dodge him, leaving the track and losing many positions. . In the first step through the finish line, Suzuki ‘s was 16th.

From then on, Rins tried to impose his pace and overtake riders. By lap 5 he was already 13th, by lap 10 he had risen to 11th position and by lap 17 he was already ninth.

In the end he crossed the finish line in the same group as Jorge Martín, Luca Marini and Johann Zarco, all 12 seconds behind the winner, and only 47 thousandths behind the Frenchman Pramac.

“It was a chaotic race,” lamented Rins on Sunday afternoon at MotorLand.

“After passing through the first sector in last position, the truth is that going back to ninth position has been quite good,” he summarized.

“In terms of pace I’m happy, because we’ve shown what we’ve been working on, if we take our best twelve or thirteen laps of the race, we have the third best pace. So it was a shame that I had to go out to the gravel to avoid Fabio, but that’s how races are, let’s see if we have better luck in the next one”, he said resignedly.

Rins was just behind Quartararo when the Frenchman went sprawling on the tarmac at turn three.

“It was tremendous, I didn’t have much time to react, luckily I didn’t hit him because the truth is that I went super close. I haven’t seen Takaaki Nakagami fall so close, he was last like a second or a second and a half of the last one, I saw that there was trouble but I couldn’t understand very well what had happened”.

Since it became known on May 2 that Suzuki is going to leave the MotoGP World Championship at the end of the season, the season has become a bit of a nonsense for the brand’s riders, who will already be placed next year in other teams. Despite this, Rins assures that he maintains his motivation for the remaining races.

“The motivation is the same with which we arrived in Aragón, fighting for the podiums. I think we have the level to do it, if the first lap had not happened I think we would have been on the podium, but now we have to think about the next”, settled the Barcelonan.

Rins rolls behind Quartararo just before the crash of the Frenchman