It could have been an epic hat trick having already added three consecutive victories in Australia, but Álvaro Bautista crashed on the fourth lap of the Indonesian Superpole Race. It was at the moment when Jonathan Rea overtook the Spanish pilot in a maneuver to the limit in which both lost the line, but the biggest victim was Ducati’s, who crashed.
At the limit, both suffered from the bike shaking due to poor tire grip on the track, which was presumably dirty. That It caused Rea to be able to withstand the thrust of his Kawasaki, but not Álvaro, who could not do anything to get back into the race. Now the Spanish is removed from controversy and defends that it was a clean overtaking.
“On the entry to turn 12, Jonathan caught up with me on the inside line. We both wanted to keep a good, clean line, and in the end we both ended up dating.”, Bautista narrates in this regard, adding that “if you deviate from the ideal line in that curve, falls happen in the blink of an eye.”
The problem, he says, came when he tried to “maneuvering the bike back to the line, using the throttle as smoothly as possible, and the rear wheel skidded. The exact same thing happened to Jonathan.”; with the difference that the person who ended up on the ground was the man from Talavera.
Of course, he defends that the overtaking of the Northern Irishman was completely legal: “His attempt to overtake me was aggressive, but clean, I have nothing to reproach him for. I don’t know if we touched or not. But I can say for sure that I fell because of the dirt on the track and not because of him.
Champion @19Bautista crashes out of the Superpole Race. Rider OK ????#IDNWorldSBK ???????? pic.twitter.com/VvpgzoLYpx
— WorldSBK (@WorldSBK) March 5, 2023
That crash meant that the Spaniard started tenth on the grid for Race 2. He didn’t mind too much because he ended up coming back and winning once again: “My sensations were good, with our maximum speed it was easy for me, like on Saturday”, he said with a smile from ear to ear after climbing to the top of the podium box.
Then the race had to be resumed, and this time he had the advantage: fourth. Not even the dirty track stopped him on this occasion, to shamelessly hack Toprak Razgatlioglu and climb positions until he ran into his teammate. “At first I didn’t know if I could catch Rinaldi, but then I saw that he was going down more and more because of the tires”, so he gave chase.
He rubs his hands: “I am very happy because we made a brilliant comeback from a difficult starting position in the morning and showed that we are strong again this year. I am happier for this victory than many others!”.
Also read: Razgatlioglu asks for help: “I need Rea to fight against the Ducati, I need help”
This puts the rankings red hot and in just two rounds: Bautista is already first in the general classification, with 112 points and a 37-point difference from Toprak Razgatliogluwhich in turn takes 5 from Andrea Locatelli.