11th on the Montmelo grid for Pol Espargaro
Monster Yamaha Tech3 Team rider Pol Espargaro will begin his home Grand Prix from 11th on the grid after a tightly contested qualifying battle at Catalunya in which the top 16 riders were covered by a second.
The young Spaniard commenced the day with a notable ride to 5th in the morning practice and when the all important qualifying session began in the afternoon, he leapt into action as he gunned for a top starting position in front of his home crowd.
On his 6th lap he posted a time of 1’41.385 he attempted to improve further on the next lap, yet he unfortunately fell at the first corner.
Nevertheless, Espargaro’s time was three tenths of a second quicker than his qualifying time from last year and when the lights go out tomorrow he will intend to climb through the pack to join the battle for the leading satellite bike position.
Pol Espargaro
“Today was a day of two stories for me. In this morning’s free practice session I felt fine, I could ride comfortably and the setup of the bike was very positive after the small changes that we made yesterday. However, then our luck changed. The temperature increased quite sharply which caused the grip levels to drop and as a result we could not ride at the pace or rhythm that we wanted to. We need to take a look at the data in order to understand what happened and how we can fix this for the race tomorrow because even though the starting positions is not great, if we don’t fix this issue the race will be very tricky. In addition, we had some more bad luck as we got a defected rear tyre which has happened already before this year. This effectively caused me to lose my first set of laps but I remained out on track as I always tend to think that the second run will be better and there is a good chance of being able to improve. When I went in and changed the tyre, my feeling on the bike improved a lot and I scored my best time but I still lacked a bit of confidence after the first few laps. Then I pushed a bit too hard because the session was drawing to a close, hit a bump and crashed. This was a real shame as I could have cut another two or three tenths of a second and clinched a start on the row in front. However, this grid position means that I need to undertake a strong start and then battle from there. We will fight and do our best but it will be a challenging race.”
Source: Tech3 Communications