Carrasco holds onto lead despite difficult weekend
The Spanish rider could only finish tenth and will have one last shot for the title at Magny-Cours
Ana Carrasco (DS Junior Team) was unable to convert her first match point at the Autodromo Internacional do Algarve and win the FIM Supersport 300 World Championship. The DS Junior Team rider did however overcome another difficult weekend at Portimao, where she arrived with a 16-point advantage over her closest rival for the championship, Luca Grunwald (Freudenberg KTM WorldSSP Team), and goes into the final weekend still leading the standings.
Had she been able to fight for the first positions, Carrasco could have taken her first crown in Portugal, but the opportunity never came. Starting from ninth on the grid, the rider from Murcia suffered from a slow start, falling back to 17th position. After a few passes Carrasco could not advance further than tenth position, with no option of a higher finish.
The Kawasaki rider did manage to record the fastest lap of the race (1’56.801) in her efforts to climb a few places, a small consolation. More important than that however was the fact that she scraped home six points more for the championship, which will allow her to face the last race of the season in command, albeit with a smaller advantage. Carrasco leads Scott Deroue (Motoport Kawasaki), her biggest threat in this season’s end, by just ten points. After her two extraordinary wins at Imola and Donington Park, the Spanish rider has been unable to finish higher than tenth in the last three races.
Carrasco admits: “It’s been a tough race, I lost several positions inside the first lap and then I found it hard to fight back. Overall, I think we’ve done a good job this weekend, but we were missing something during the race. On the bright side, we’re still leading the championship. I hope that in France we can improve and fight for the win”.
The final and decisive FIM Supersport 300 World Championship race will take place in less than two weeks at the French circuit of Magny-Cours, and four riders can still mathematically win the title: Carrasco, Deroue, Mika Pérez (Kawasaki ParkinGO Team) and Grunwald. Watch the final chapter of an epic season thanks to WorldSBK VideoPass.
