Crystal clear water, white beaches, and a strip of asphalt just over 4 kilometers long. If there’s a biker’s paradise on earth, it’s probably on the island of Lombok, Indonesia, namely, the Mandalika circuit. The SBK inaugurated it last October, and tomorrow the MotoGP riders will make its acquaintance.
Three test days are scheduled, from Friday to Sunday, which will start at 2 am and end at 10 (Italian time). The track has 17 corners, 6 of which are left and 11 right, and the longest straight is just over 500 meters. It’s a guided circuit and very different from Sepang, where the tests were hosted last week.
Bastianini talked about it today in our live Bar Sport broadcast (see video above).
“It has short straights, only one is long enough, but it’s very wide,” he said. “It looks like a nice track, with wide corners and some braking points where you lean the bike. I think we could have fun. It’s similar to the circuits in Buriram and Termas de Rio Hondo. It has a bit of that type of design. It’s fairly flat with some positive banking corners and some negative ones. The grip doesn’t seem that great. We’ll see tomorrow.“
But it has another flaw.
“There are two very worn out corners where they had to redo the asphalt, but I don’t think they did it very well,” the Beast said jokingly.
In the SBK, the pole position was 1’32″877, while the fastest race lap was 1’34″288.
“I believe we’ll be faster during these tests, I think by almost a second,” Enea stated. “The SBK has long-lasting soft tires with which you can make a difference in qualifying while, when racing in the MotoGP, we only increase the test times by five or six tenths.”
So, now all we have to do is find out who’ll be most at their ease on the new track, and this moment is just a few hours away.