Nico Terol and Jordi Torres begin to make progress in Qatar

The Moto2 World Championship kicked off with two free practice sessions under the Losail floodlights this evening, with just two more to go before the all-important qualifying session on Saturday night.

Takaaki Nakagami set the pace today with an advantage of just 0.052 seconds over Tito Rabat, although with fifteen riders inside the same second the Moto2 class once again promises to be as close and unpredictable as ever.

The first meaningful sessions of the year did not go to plan for the MAPFRE Aspar Team, with both Nico Terol and Jordi Torres struggling for feeling around the Losail Circuit.

Both riders calmly went about improving the situation, Terol reverting to data from last season and Torres using his preseason work to improve the performance of their respective machines.

Progress began to build in the second session and Nico was able to finish in fourteenth place with Jordi in 21st, the pair now extra determined to make the most of the remaining track time before Sunday night’s race.

14th Nico Terol 2.01.394 (32 laps):
“The feeling today here in Qatar was a bit strange, I struggled to find the right line and it to get into any kind of rhythm. The positive thing is that we started to work things out towards the end of the session and using the data we gathered at this track last year we were able to steadily improve the lap time and close the gap to the guys at the top. Even though I am in fourteenth place I am happy with the feeling we had in the second session and the way we ended the evening. We will have to keep making similar progress tomorrow to get up to where we need to be. So far Losail has been more difficult than we expected but we will try to get the bike moving better tomorrow.”

21st Jordi Torres 2.01.896 (37 laps):
“I just didn’t have a feeling in the first session, I couldn’t get the bike running or brake where I wanted to. It is only my second time at this track but today it felt like I’d never been here before at all. I couldn’t find the right line through the corners or get a feeling, but we have become adept at solving problems during preseason and that’s what we have to do tomorrow. We already started to improve things in the second session and even though we have made a slow start to the weekend we still have two very important sessions before Sunday’s race, so we will work hard to make the most of them.”

Source: Aspar Media