Pata Yamaha’s Alex Lowes was so far off the pace at last weekend’s Portimao WorldSBK race, it smacked of something seriously wrong with his set-up, given his performance in the preceeding test.

The new uncle set his best lap of the weekend – a 1’42.458 - in free practice four which was the sharp end of a second slower than Jonathan Rea’s best time on race tyres.

At the test, which was much hotter and with a lot of new parts to evaluate, Lowes put in a 1’42.140 on a race tyre and was only a tenth behind Rea.

Lowes isn’t available for comment at this time (probably learning all about the unpleasantness of nappies via FaceTime) but his team statement read:

“Overall it’s been a tough weekend here in Portimão. I just haven’t been able to dial in the bike to give me the feeling I needed, and I was losing time on corner exit in both races here. The team and Yamaha’s engineers worked tirelessly to find a solution, but we were just missing that little bit of feeling that would have made all the difference.

“It would have been easy to push too hard to compensate, so at least I’m happy to be leaving here with points from both races. We have some work to do now, but I’m confident we’ll be back where we should be in Magny-Cours.”

Lowes’ aim for the weekend had been to make some gains in the corner-exit department and he had a new swingarm and linkage with which to do it, plus some new electronic strategies. Maybe the curse of Yamaha’s electronics problem is filtering down…