Aspar Honda’s Eugene Laverty now has the consistency he needs to push for Open class MotoGP victories with a different swingarm supplied by Honda but there is still work to be done to get the right setup.

Laverty was on a par with the his vastly more experienced team-mate Nicky Hayden all weekend at Assen and was pushing for points in Saturday’s race until he crashed out of 15th place but the Monegasque has taken positives from the weekend.

“We fought for victory in the Open class, but unfortunately it was only in 15th position. The important thing is that I was consistently fighting until I went down. I pushed very hard, and in fact my fastest lap came just before the crash,” said Laverty.

“We had some problems with the front, and I lost it at turn 10 when accelerating. We’d had several warnings on similar corners, and it was just an unfortunate crash. We have done a great job this weekend with the new swingarm, and we can see that it has great potential and allows us to be consistent.

“We need to work on it, because when improve one area we get worse in others. This is my first crash in a race this year; it hasn’t been a great weekend, so we will try to change our luck in Germany.”