Alex Rins and Joan Mir qualify 7th and 17th for the #CatalanGP

 In MotoGP, News

The Catalan GP will see Team Suzuki Ecstar’s riders start from seventh and 17th on the grid after a sizzling qualifying session in which Joan Mir was unable to get through Q1 and Alex Rins held on for a third-row start.

After using FP3 and FP4 to continue working on settings and tyre options, despite getting close to the Top 10 in FP3, Mir missed out on passage to Q2, whereas Rins managed to slot himself into ninth place on his final push. In FP4 the track was running extremely hot as the riders got the feel for tomorrow’s likely race conditions.

Mir tried to break into the all-important top spots in Q1 but he was unable to, although he felt an improvement on the front-end feel compared to yesterday. He closed the session in seventh, putting him 17th on the grid, and he hopes to carve through tomorrow.

In Q2 Rins felt confident on his first exit, pushing up to third, but on his second exit he couldn’t find any more time and he therefore finished up seventh. He’s ready to attack tomorrow’s race from this third row spot.

Alex Rins:

“I’m feeling happy with my performance so far this weekend; the team and I are doing a good job and I have nice pace. I gave everything in qualifying, and seventh isn’t a bad place to start. It will be a very demanding race tomorrow; in terms of heat, competitiveness, and tyre wear. My target will be to get up the front and fight with those guys, so let’s try and get a good start and go for it.”

Joan Mir:

“I’m still not feeling 100% confident with my feeling, but we’ve made a good step forward and I’m happy about that. So, because of this work done overnight, I was able to do much better on used tyres. I am still struggling to do a time attack, because on the new tyres I don’t have the best feeling. The main thing is that we know the situation and I will work to overcome it. And I know that I can have strong pace, especially later on in the race.”

Contact Us

We're not around right now. But you can send us an email and we'll get back to you, asap.

Start typing and press Enter to search