Pol Espargaro to start from the head of the fifth row in Texas
Pol Espargaro came agonisingly close to competing in QP2 twice, but just fell short after giving his all in two highly competitive MotoGP sessions. The young Spaniard kicked off his day by further adjusting the setup of his Yamaha YZR-M1 during FP3 and he missed out on the cut off to QP 2 by a blink of an eye and a mere 0.014 of a second. When the first qualifying practice commenced, Espargaro leapt forward and quickly set about speeding to a top lap. After pushing non-stop, he closed the session with a time that was just 0.018 from second, meaning that he will start the third round of the MotoGP World Championship from the head of the 5th row on the starting grid. Nevertheless, Espargaro intends to fight all the way to the chequered flag with the aim to join his teammate in the battle for the top independent rider position.
Pol Espargaro – Position: 13th – Time: 2’04.867 – Laps: 6
“The day ended in a disappointing way and of course, I’m not satisfied with the result and how things went. It’s strange because overall we managed to improve the bike and the feelings with the new harder rear tyre were positive. Yet, from FP3 onwards we started to experience some vibrations, which we weren’t able to solve today. Nevertheless, even if it was tricky to ride, I pushed as much as I possibly could in all of the sessions. In the morning, I just missed QP2 by 0.014 in the final seconds of the session and to be honest, this was quite frustrating. Afterwards, we experienced the same issues in FP4 and again in Qualifying 1. There, I really gave it everything I had and risked crashing out in every braking area, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to go to QP2 and once more, I missed out by only a small margin of 0.018. To start from the fifth row complicates the race a bit because the first corner is critical. In fact, I had a problem here at the beginning of the GP last year where another rider crashed into me and I couldn’t do anything about it. Anyway, this afternoon we will have to work to find a solution to our issue and I think that if we turn the situation around we have a good chance of riding to a decent result. Also, we still have to decide which rear tyre we want to use because at the moment we don’t have a clear indication. The soft is too soft for the 21 laps and with the hard one we can be more consistent but this kind of tyre makes us lose a few tenths every lap. So we have some work to do, but I am determined to finish the Grand Prix as well as I possibly can tomorrow.”
Source – Tech3
