Maverick Viñales to start Jerez GP from row 2
Movistar Yamaha MotoGP’s Maverick Viñales will start tomorrow’s Gran Premio de España from the second row of the grid after taking fourth place respectively in today‘s qualifying session.
Viñales was the last rider out this afternoon to clock a time in Q2 and immediately moved up to provisional fourth place, before the pace picked up. He put his head down and improved his time to a 1‘38.677s to promote to third on the provisional front row and returned to the box. On a one-stop strategy, he entered pit lane with seven minutes of the session remaining and went back out on track one and a half minute later.
He had just enough time for two more tries and didn’t hesitate to put the hammer down to drop a 1’38s lap, but he was unable to improve on his earlier achievement. His second hot lap of the session was fast enough to hold fourth place, 0.428s from pole, on the second row of the grid.
Maverick Viñales:
“I think today was good. We worked quite hard and tried to find a good set-up. Honestly, the right side of the tyre is really good, but when I go onto the left side I suddenly have a lot of wheelspin. We have to check it out this night and work really hard for tomorrow‘s warm-up. We still have to decide on the tyre options. We did many laps on the medium tyre and the lap times weren‘t so bad, so we have to continue like that. Like we did today, we have to work a little bit more than we usually do during the warm-up, so I think tomorrow it‘s important to find a good set-up, especially for the left side.”