Suffering from the after effects of Friday’s crash, Sam Lowes struggled through a challenging qualifying day at the Sachsenring, to secure seventh on the German Moto2 grid.
Consistently fast in race trim all weekend, the Brit was unable to improve on his Friday times during the morning’s final practice, however, he remained in the top-14 at the close of FP3, granting himself direct access to the afternoon’s Q2 battle.
The discomfort of his neck injury was unfortunately exacerbated when Lowes crashed his Marc VDS machine again, this time at the first corner. While improvement on his opening 1’24.416 hot-lap was prevented, his earlier time was still enough for a third row start in Sunday’s 28-lap race.
“I don’t feel very comfortable and I’m finding it difficult to understand how to be fast on this track,’ Lowes admitted from Germany as qualifying concluded.
“I’ve never really clicked with it and again I’m struggling this weekend. I’m not as fast as I’d like to be but I need to say a big thanks to the team because they improved the bike a lot for qualifying and we made some steps forward.
“I’m not where I want to be, but starting seventh I will get my head down and see what happens. I’ll give it all my all and hopefully we can leave here with a positive result.”