Iker Lecuona has abandoned his conservative approach to bike setup in a bid to close the gap to Nicolo Bulega in the 2026 WorldSBK standings. The Honda rider is the only one mathematically capable of beating Bulega to the title, but he trails by 146 points after three races at Magny-Cours this weekend.
Meanwhile, Lecuona holds a comfortable margin of over 100 points over third-placed Yari Montella, giving him little to lose by experimenting. On Saturday, he hinted at wanting to try changes to find more speed, and after Race 2 he confirmed that modifications were made for the Superpole Race and again for Race 2, although the latter proved counterproductive.
“As I said yesterday, it will be very difficult to beat Nicolo, but our target is to find those tenths,” Lecuona told WorldSBK.com. “The team worked hard, they changed the bike a lot. Normally we are conservative, but I said, ‘The championship with Nicolo is done, we manage well for second place with Montella’. I want to change a lot to find different ways to close the gap.”
The changes made Race 2 tough for the Spaniard. “This morning the bike was different, in the afternoon we changed more and I struggled a lot. It was a tough race; from lap four I had rear issues, and by lap seven or nine I struggled with the front,” he explained.
Despite the difficulties, Lecuona views the experiment as valuable, especially with an upcoming test at Cremona before the next round in September. “It was a difficult but positive weekend because we gathered important data from three different bikes. Now the engineers need to analyse what happened before the Cremona test. It’s time to try something completely different,” he added.
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