After a podium on Saturday where he said he would have something more on Sunday, the truth is that it didn’t happen for Aleix Espargaró yesterday in the long race in Losail. The Aprilia rider went further and dubbed the race as a ‘nightmare’, especially due to the problems he experienced with his rear tire.
To journalists in Qatar, #41 began by recalling that he had high expectations for Sunday, something that did not come true, quite the opposite: ‘On Saturday I went to bed hoping that this Sunday would be a great day. One of those days that you don’t see many times a year. I had good chances, I felt very comfortable and from the beginning, on the warm-up lap, I noticed that the rear tire was cold. It was a nightmare throughout the race, I couldn’t do anything. Let’s see if Michelin and the team can find a solution, but it has been…’
And the criticism didn’t stop there, with Espargaró reminding what happened the day before: ‘We cannot use the word I would like to use for the tire this Sunday, but it didn’t work at any moment. On Saturday, at the end of the Sprint, I was using the second 52 medium tire, I was like a missile. I was super confident and today I couldn’t even do a 53s medium. It was ice, it was… It was a nightmare’.
The interruption seconds before the race started, with Raúl Fernández, was something that only made things more complicated and to make matters worse, another problem arose: ‘That certainly didn’t help. But, in any case, it’s the same for everyone. Also, the fact that the engine temperature skyrocketed didn’t help. It reached values that, if it were a practice session, the bike would stop on its own because the engine could break. But in the race, the alarms go off’.
