After all the talk, the riders are finally on the ground and can see the Balaton Park Circuit for themselves. Before arriving in Hungary, there had been much talk of the safety of the track. So much so that Loris Capirossi and Tomé Alfonso forced the circuit to include a number of chicanes and extra corners to make it safer.
The changes have worked. Is the track safe? “When you walk around you feel that that the walls are a little bit close,” said Pol Espargaro, in for the injured Maverick Viñales in Tech3 for the foreseeable future. “But then the speed is not high, so the walls are fine and it’s super safe.” Who could have guess that a strategy which has seen radical improvements in urban safety (drastically reducing speeds) would be successful at a race track too?
“They did a good job with the small chicane,” Luca Marini said. Perhaps too good a job. “Maybe a little bit too slow chicane. But they said that there was no possibility to make it better.”
There was still one place that concerned the Honda HRC Castrol rider. “Just a little bit worried about the wall in Turn 1.” He admitted that concern was rooted in personal experience. “For sure it’s … just because I have my experience what happened to me two months ago [in Suzuka], and it’s not so easy. Because if you crash losing the front in the last part of the braking, it’s OK. But if you have a problem before, it will be…” He searched for the right words. “We need to check.”
