Benoit Paturel of the De Baets MX team has scored 9 World Championship points in the fifth round of the MXGP World Championship in Agueda, Portugal. In the very muddy conditions, Paturel managed to finish sixteenth and eighteenth in the motos.
On Saturday morning the conditions were still quite good but this changed quickly. The rain caused the track to get worse and worse over the weekend. Paturel needed some time to find the right rhythm on Saturday and, despite several attempts, did not get any further than a seventeenth time in time practice. In the qualifying heat, on the other hand, he rode a consistent race and crossed the finish line in a good tenth place.
In the first moto on Sunday, the rain came pouring down. Paturel came out of the first lap in fifteenth place but started to advance and managed to get further and further back to the front. In the second part of the race he was in eighth place but then got into trouble and lost a lot of time. As a result, he finished disappointed in sixteenth place.
In the second moto it was survival. Paturel ran into problems right in the early stages, so he only came out of the first lap in twenty-fourth place. During the race he worked his way back up to the points and after a difficult moto he crossed the finish line in eighteenth place.
With these results, he finished nineteenth in the general classification and is now twentieth in the standings.
In the EMX125 class, Dex Kooiker didn’t have luck on his side. In the first moto he was involved in a crash at the start but came back strongly. Unfortunately, he just missed out on scoring with a twenty-first place. In the second moto he started strong and was just outside the top five when he crashed briefly and was knocked back to eleventh place.
Kooiker started to advance again but had to deal with a mechanical problem that forced him to leave the race.
The De Baets MX team will now travel to Spain where the next Grand Prix is scheduled for next weekend in Lugo.
Overall MXGP Portugal:
1 Pauls Jonass 44 Pnt
2 Romain Febvre 38 Pnt
3 Tim Gajser 36 Pnt
4 Brian Bogers 30 Pnt
5 Cornelius Toendel 29 Pnt
19 Benoit Paturel 8 Pnt
World Championship Standings MXGP:
1 Tim Gajser 252 Pnt
2 Jorge Prado 238 Pnt
3 Romain Febvre 220 Pnt
4 Jeffrey Herlings 198 Pnt
5 Pauls Jonass 192 Pnt
20 Benoit Paturel 35 Pnt
Photocredits – Fullspectrum Media
