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Romain Febvre keeps the red plate with yet another podium
Kawasaki Racing Team MXGP's Romain Febvre retained the FIM World MXGP Motocross Championship red plate with his twelfth podium of the campaign at the Iitti-KymiRing in Finland.
A good gate was negated on the run down to turn one in the first moto and the Frenchman found himself ninth after the initial sort-out. He was seventh within two laps and sixth next time round but the time gaps on the leaderboard had already developed on the rough sand-based track so further advances became more and more difficult. By lap eight he was pushing for fifth but met stiff resistance and eventually fell without losing a place. It took six laps to pull back those lost ten seconds and move into fifth with a stunning move down a bumpy straight with three laps remaining. He was closed down straight out of the gate in race two to emerge sixth from the first turn but was already fourth at the completion of the first lap. A decisive outside move at the start of lap three saw him advance into third but the leader was already sixteen seconds clear on a free track. A mistake by the front-runner on lap six tightened up the leaderboard battle and a slingshot move through the waves on lap nine saw the Frenchman pass for second. Personal fastest laps saw the Kawasaki rider edge even closer through the next couple of laps but the exertions of three tough rides through the pack were starting to take their toll with excessively high temperatures in the thin Scandinavian air and he eventually had to accept second in moto and overall for his twelfth podium from thirteen GPs. He retains the red plate of the series leader, fifteen points clear of his closest chaser.
Romain Febvre: "I made it hard for myself all weekend with bad starts as well as mistakes yesterday and in the first moto today. We definitely have to work on the starts; as we saw at Matterley, if I start near the front I can win. I got close in the second race when Lucas fell but I had to fight hard coming from the back and I paid the penalty; I thought I could maybe do something at the end but I had used too much energy before that and had to settle for second."
Febvre's KRT teammate Pauls Jonass made a tentative return to riding during the week as he recovers from the shoulder injury he sustained in Germany at the end of May; the Latvian will maintain a patient recovery process before he and the team make a mutual plan for his return to race action.