Frustrating qualifying at Valencia for Jorge Martin & Juanfran Guevara
The heat and excellent track conditions continued for the Moto3 riders today at the Ricardo Tormo circuit, and lap times from the opening day were improved upon.
The best time in qualifying broke the circuit record, and there appears to still be room for improvement.
John McPhee will start from pole position, having held off several late pushes from his rivals for the final qualifying top spot of the season.
The Moto3 class proved to be as tough as ever, with the fastest 20 riders all placing within a second of each other. Series leader Danny Kent will take off in tomorrow’s race from eighteenth.
MAPFRE Team Mahindra riderJorge Martín was not particularly off the pace on Saturday, but the close nature of the qualifying session meant that he will start far back on the grid on Sunday.
Jorge’s teammate Bagnaia took nineteenth place and Jorge twenty-fourth, but both have a strong pace and a better feeling on their bikes than yesterday.
They concluded the afternoon shootout just six tenths and one second, respectively, off the top spot. The Italian will be looking for a repeat of the Australian GP, at which he moved from the back of the grid to the leading group within three laps.
Teammate Juanfran Guevara struggled with his setup and will start the Valencian GP from thirtieth.
24th Jorge Martín 1.40.380 (14 laps):
“There was a very large group on track on the final laps and we all got in each others’ way, so I could not improve on the last two laps. We will start in twenty-fourth position, but we are all very close together and it will certainly be a fun race tomorrow -albeit difficult. On the straight we are suffering a lot, but we are still fast in the corners and I can overtake at many points on the track. I hope to get up in the leading group as soon as possible in what will be an intense race with the title at stake. We will have to take care not to disturb the two riders who have a chance of the title, but other than that we will put up a hard fight. This morning we had a great pace, and with race tyres I felt very comfortable, which is something positive for tomorrow’s race.”
30th Juanfran Guevara 1.40.674 (18 laps):
“Yesterday we had some problems and today I did not feel comfortable riding. We worked on the setup but I did not manage to ride as I would have liked. We really have no big problems, but there are small details that are making us lose some time in each sector. Today we did many laps trying to correct the behaviour of the bike. We have some ideas on what to try to improve things, so tomorrow we will try them out during the warm-up session. In preseason we were almost a second faster than we have been this weekend, so we will work to get back to that level.”
Source: Aspar Media
