Lorenzo insists: "The championship is not finished"
Yamaha rider Jorge Lorenzo insists he still has a chance to catch MotoGP's runaway points leader Marc Marquez, despite the most recent setback to his title hopes at the Sachsenring.
Yamaha MotoGP
Lorenzo had struggled throughout the German Grand Prix weekend and could do no better than 15th in a wet-dry race, while Marquez doubled his championship lead with victory.
With only seven points from the last three races, the reigning champion is now 48 points off Marquez - but he remains convinced the gap is not yet insurmountable.
Asked whether his hopes to be crowned champion in 2016 were now gone, Lorenzo said: "No, no, the championship is not finished until we don't have the mathematical chance to win. Everything can happen.
"We saw today that Marc, who is very brave in other conditions, very fast in other conditions, crashed this morning in the warm-up and he's been lucky not to get injured, no?
"We saw in other championships that a leader with a big advantage can lose the championship. You have to be positive and still believe that it's possible [to win].
"But firstly we have to recover the confidence, recover the good results that we don't have now. It has been three races very bad for us, in different circumstances."
"I have do something to improve"
While Lorenzo said that the lowly 15th-place finish was partly down to a strategy mistake - the team having called him in for the bike swap too late - the Spaniard admitted he just doesn't have the pace with the Michelins on a wet track.
"I must do something, sincerely, with the Michelin tyres, in these conditions," he admitted.
"With the Bridgestone, I could sometimes fight for the win, sometimes I could fight for the fifth place - but now, with this bike and these tyres and these conditions, I struggle much more.
"In the warm-up, I was terrible, four seconds slower than the fastest one. In the race, I improved my speed - one second, one and a half [off], I could stay with Dani [Pedrosa] in the beginning, with Pol [Espargaro], more or less.
"But when it dried up, I started to lose the front feeling, the others could keep the pace and I couldn't.
"I hope [it gets better]. I hope I will do something to improve as much as I can, to improve my confidence. I am seeing that it's not easy for me, with my riding, to get quickly the confidence with these tyres. I have to do something."
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