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Enea Bastianini is experiencing a two-faced start to the 2025 World Championship. On the one hand there are consistently disappointing performances in qualifying, forcing him to start far from the front rows of the grid. But on the other there are great comebacks in the race, with Enea often moving up the classification showing that he has a very good pace, unfortunately mortified by grid positions which are far from his standards.
At Jerez it will be important for him to try to improve in qualifying, perhaps even experimenting using the data of his teammates in KTM, primarily those of Maverick Vinales who impressed in Qatar in the race.
We are in Europe, how is the balance of the first races?
"The balance... let's say I would have expected to do something more at least in practice, while in the race I have always been quite fast and competitive. I often moved up the rankings, while in practice I often struggled more and that's what we need to work on."
You said in Qatar that Vinales had a different bike from yours.
"I didn't say that, I said we are all trying different things. It's a job we are all doing and it's normal that everyone has their own needs, certainly even during the tests it will be important to try a lot of different solutions to see if we have found the right direction to take or not."
But will it be a GP of experiments here or do you think you will be more aligned?
"It's not such a different GP, the bike for good or bad is this one. It's about details that may or may not work, we will do some testing here especially in testing. But even tomorrow I will try something. In the tests we will have something extra, but in general the point is to work with what we have to understand the direction to take."
What are you missing in the time attack?
"The bike has a lot of grip, but it takes me off line and that makes me struggle a lot, I can't hold the correct line. It often becomes a disaster. At Losail I tried to follow Ogura in qualifying and in every corner under acceleration he would take off. In the race I can close this gap especially when the tires drop a little bit, while in practice I can't. I think it's a question of balance, we have to get the rear end right, because in my opinion this is important. The first throttle lock is not right and I'm always a little bit late on that."
But how did you experience that second place from Vinales, despite the disqualification?
"For me it was good, because it's good to see that the bike can get there. Maverick was good, he understood how to make the bike work well especially on Sunday, he made a big step forward on Sunday. If he did it, it means we can all do it, but I have to stay focused on my work, although it will be useful to look at Vinales' data, for sure."
Could that performance have been a fluke?
"It might be, in the sense that we know that at the moment we are not at the top, the bike is not yet at the top and we know it well. We also have to see on other tracks, like this one, how things are going. But I have confidence that the bike can go stronger than it is going right now. Maverick showed a lot in Qatar."
Where do you think you are in your adaptation to this KTM?
"In the race I don't know why I can always have better feelings, while I certainly expected to be further ahead in practice, but I don't know at the moment which way to go at that point. This is something to get right as soon as possible, because always starting from behind you struggle."
Maybe it's wrong to have differently set-up bikes for KTM today?
"When you are a little bit slow, it's normal to try many different solutions. At the moment we are slow, we have been from the beginning, nobody has been very fast, even in free practice. When things go like that everyone tries something and often you go in different directions to find the right one. At the moment if we look at the last races Maverick has been very fast, so it would be natural to follow his direction. But that may not be 100 percent true. We have to try different things, but right now we have to stay focused, I have to be focused on myself."
Do you still not have a fixed base set-up to work on?
"In my opinion right now I don't have a solid base to work on. Things often go better or worse, sometimes I change set-up between free practice and qualifying. Usually on Sunday things are better, but I wouldn't say we have the situation 100 percent under control."
