Faubel and Moncayo find good improvement in Catalunya qualifying but looking for more
The Moto3 riders faced track temperatures of over fifty degrees in the qualifying session for the Catalan Grand Prix, making it a heated session in search of pole position. Times from the practice sessions dropped significantly and the lead of the standings changed hands frequently, with no clear dominant force in the lower cylinder class. In the end, the grid was decided in the final five minutes when Maverick Viñales recorded the fastest lap time. The top twelve were all within a second of one another, leading to expectations of a close fight when the lights go out on Sunday.
BANKIA Aspar Team riders Héctor Faubel and Alberto Moncayo continued to creep their way up the order in each of the practice sessions at Montmeló, gradually shaving tenths off their best times in each run. Up until the midway point in qualifying it had been difficult for the Spanish duo to find pace, but they found it soon enough after that and had a five-minute push for significant improvement. Faubel and Moncayo lowered their previous best times by over half a second, with the Valencian just eight tenths off pole. He will start from ninth on the grid, whilst Moncayo will take off from seventeenth.
9th Héctor Faubel 1.53.033 (18 laps): “I was hoping to at least get on the second row, but it wasn’t possible. Despite not being completely happy, we are on the third row. The times are very tight, there are a lot of riders separated by just the smallest of margins and we have no clue as to how the race is going to go tomorrow. I suppose that it will be a difficult one, that will drag on because of the heat, so it will be important to hold back slightly to keep something for the end of the race. We will have to look at how to preserve our tyres in order to get to the end with our pace intact. There is a chance that it will rain when the race starts, but I’m not so worried about that after seeing at Le Mans that we were also competitive in the wet. I am happy, because we took another step forward today, but we have to keep developing in order to keep up with the fastest riders.”
17th Alberto Moncayo 1.53.516 (16 laps): “Today we tried to solve some problems and recover our feel. I found it hard to find pace in the morning, and we saw that there were many riders within 1.5 seconds of one another. Everybody is pushing hard and things were really even, so the smallest mistake would drop you down the order. We changed our strategy in the afternoon in order to push for strong times from the start, but once again we didn’t have the pace. In the end we put on new tyres and I tried to go hard, but it was still difficult to improve my times in dense traffic. It is a shame, because I believe that we could have shaved another three or four tenths off our final time. We have to make a daring plan for tomorrow, looking to pass people at the start and put ourselves in a strong position.”
Source: Aspar Team
