Miguel Oliveira promised in the first qualifying session of the French MotoGP Grand Prix, but in Q2 he couldn’t do better than 12th. And it was in 11th place that he finished the Sprint race hours later – in which he couldn’t make much progress.
The Trackhouse Racing driver mentioned that he was affected by yellow flags in qualifying, while in the Sprint race there was an issue with the bike: ‘Honestly, it was a good performance in Q1, but then in Q2 with my new tire I had yellow flags for three consecutive laps, so I couldn’t do much more. And then in the race it was a bit disappointing because I had some kind of problem either with the front tire or with the front part of the bike – I can’t really tell at this moment. But something was really wrong. The team is still trying to understand what happened and try to avoid it for tomorrow‘.
Asked about the consequences of the problem he mentioned, Oliveira explained: ‘Basically, I had huge front-end slides, in straight braking and especially at the apex on acceleration, so I was about to fall going slow, and that’s really strange. I just tried to attack and not crash at the same time, so basically I couldn’t do anything. This morning I did 1m31s very easily and this afternoon to do a lap in the low 1m32s was killing me to achieve. So, something was very wrong‘.
Rain may arrive in Le Mans this Sunday, and #88 emphasized the need to be prepared for anything: ‘Tomorrow looks very different from today, so we have to be prepared for any condition and try to adapt very quickly to whatever is on track‘.
