After the wet track surface on Friday, the only real day that WorldSBK riders get to sort out their machines and tyre options at Magny-Cours, Yamaha's Alex Lowes was one of the many riders who entered the races a bit blind.

He paid the price until his team made some bike changes for race two and Lowes scored third place, his seventh podium of the season.

“Due to the lack of dry time I have not been as comfortable as I expected probably in the dry this weekend,” confirmed Lowes to bikesportnews.com. “Two sixth places in the first two Magny Cours races were sort of damage limitation a bit, and we made a decent change for the last race.”

It made a difference for Lowes, and he even drew himself close to the eventual Rea/van der Mark fight for the win.

“In the mid-part I was too far back to try and catch Michael and Jonathan, but I dug in and managed to get on the back of them - but when I got there my front tyre was pretty much destroyed again. It is frustrating because I couldn’t fight at the end but I am happy to finish with a podium. Getting on the podium with Michael is great for the team, and sets us up for the two flyways at the end.”

The changes Lowes team made were to allow him to regain some agility and turning. “Just a little bit of turning on the bike,” he explained. “It felt really heavy and quite difficult, so I wasn’t fast enough! That was the basic problem; I was going too slow!”

Lowes is still not speaking of what almost the entire paddock now believes will be his adoption into the official Kawasaki squad. When asked why nothing has been said yet about exactly where he is going, for whatever manufacturer, Lowes was coy about it all.

“It is not all sorted yet…I do not know what to say to that.”