Alonso Lopez proved on Sunday that motorcycle Grand Prix racing might not be a numbers game and that less can be more in winning the championship.
The Spaniard took his second win in the 12 races in which he
has raced since he joined the SpeedUp team, and with two other podium results,
he has already marked himself as one of the riders to beat in 2023.
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That has happened in spite of the fact that for the first six races of the season, SpeedUp had Italian Romano Fenati on the bike until Lopez, who lost out on his expected Moto3 ride on the eve of the season, took over.
Lopez raced in four Moto2 rounds last year, three of them with SpeedUp and one on the Flexbox Kalex, and his best result of 12th place in Germany gave little indication of what he was capable of.
And there are only two of the bikes on the grid. The German Kalex bike has dominated Moto2 racing, though Luca Boscoscuro and his small band of talented engineers and mechanics kept working away to make their bike better. Only the SpeedUp team runs these bikes and rookie Fermin Aldeguer is still learning his way, the 17-year-old taking pole on Saturday.
Lopez's Phillip Island win is the seventh for the Boscoscuro chassis, which was previously known as a SpeedUp. Andrea Iannone took three wins in the 2010 season, going on to take second in the points, but perhaps the most notable SpeedUp win came in 2018 in Barcelona.
It was the only Moto2 win for the rider, who quickly came to the attention of some of the MotoGP teams. His name? Fabio Quartararo.
