Miguel Oliveira has not been able to repeat the performance he showed at the Portuguese WorldSBK so far this weekend in the Netherlands, and he feels his margin to the leading riders is \u201cjust too big\u201d at Assen.<\/p>\n
The Dutch Round promised to be one of the most difficult of the World Superbike<\/a> season for BMW, after it was the only round in 2025 that did not feature the M1000 RR on the podium in dry conditions.<\/p>\n Oliveira acknowledged this before the weekend, but after Friday felt the extent of his struggles aboard the BMW was greater than he\u2019d expected.<\/p>\n On Saturday morning things didn\u2019t seem to have improved as he qualified down in 13th, but in Race 1 he climbed into the top-10, finishing seventh but 18 seconds off the win.<\/p>\n The Portuguese was relatively downbeat after the race, although he felt the \u201cfinal outcome\u201d was positive.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a tough one, but managed to recover some positions and the final outcome of the race is positive, of course, but still a lot of work to do,\u201d Miguel Oliveira<\/a> told WorldSBK.com after Race 1 at Assen.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew this track was going to be a little bit of a challenge for us and we are just trying to maximise everything we have in the garage.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor sure it\u2019s not the place where we want to fight, but it\u2019s the reality of today and tomorrow we will fight another day to be further up in the top.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliveira added that \u201cthe pace is just not there\u201d this weekend which makes it difficult to battle during the races.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like we are on a tough track, that we are trying to work out with the bike, in terms of the setup, to be as fast as we can, but the gap is just too big and the pace is just not there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the pace is not there, it\u2019s really hard to fight during the race, even with the circumstances of tyre drops, front and rear \u2013 today I didn\u2019t have much left to give and maybe sixth position was possible but as soon as the drops come and you start to fight in a group your strategy is gone and you\u2019re just improvising lap-by-lap.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the difficulties in Assen, Oliveira climbed one position in the riders\u2019 standings after Race 1 and now sits third, one place ahead of Axel Bassani<\/a>, although he\u2019s now 23 points behind Iker Lecuona<\/a> and 84 points behind Nicolo Bulega<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miguel Oliveira has not been able to repeat the performance he showed at the Portuguese WorldSBK so far…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,3557,806,805,803,804,23900,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-615858","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-miguel-oliveira","11":"tag-motor","12":"tag-motor-sports","13":"tag-motosport","14":"tag-motosports","15":"tag-rokit-bmw-motorrad-worldsbk-team","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}