Friday at the Americas GP of MotoGP fell short of what could be expected from Brad Binder. The Red Bull KTM rider only managed to reach 14th place in the session and, therefore, did not secure direct qualification for the second phase of qualifying.
The South African explained that the changes made to the RC16 between the two sessions yesterday were for the worse, leaving him without a good feeling on the bike from the start of the afternoon session:
– It was very good at the beginning, in FP1 I felt very good, the bike seemed quite reasonable. Overall everything was working well. We tried something different for the afternoon. I tried to change the setup a bit and had difficulties getting into the rhythm in the first sequence of laps. The feeling just wasn’t there.
Even though he tried to change back to search for a fast lap, Binder was not successful: ‘So I tried the first attack on the stopwatch with some variation, but it didn’t work. And for the last sequence of laps we just put back what we had in the morning and the time was better. Unfortunately, I simply lost a lot of feeling and didn’t have the references to attack in the last sequence of laps. That cost us the chance to pass [to Q2], but at least now we have a very clear idea of which direction we need to go on Saturday‘.
Asked if there is still a lot of time to gain with the bike setup, #33 confirmed: ‘To be honest, it sounds better than it seems. My afternoon lap was not good at all. Definitely we can cut a lot there easily‘.
