After a podium on Saturday where he even said that he would ‘have something more on Sunday’, the truth is that it didn’t happen for Aleix Espargaró yesterday in the long race at Losail. The Aprilia rider went further and called the race a ‘nightmare’, especially given the problems he experienced with his rear tyre.
Speaking to journalists on Qatari soil, the #41 began by recalling that he had high expectations for Sunday, something that didn’t materialise, quite the opposite: ‘On Saturday I went to bed hoping that Sunday would be a great day. One of those days you don’t see very often every year. I had a good chance, I felt very comfortable and right from the start, on the warm-up lap, I noticed that the rear tyre was frozen. It was a nightmare the whole race, there was nothing I could do. Let’s see if Michelin and the team can find a solution, but it’s been…’.
And the criticism didn’t stop there, with Espargaró recalling what happened the day before: ‘We can’t use the word I’d like to use for this Sunday’s tyre, but it didn’t work at any point. On Saturday, at the end of the Sprint, I had the tyre used on the medium 52s , it was going like a missile. I was overconfident and this sunday I couldn’t do 53s average. It was ice, it was… It was a nightmare’.
The interruption seconds before the race started, with Raúl Fernández, was something that only complicated matters and yet another problem arose: ‘That certainly didn’t help. But in any case, it’s the same for everyone. It also didn’t help that the engine temperature shot up. 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 alarm bells go off’.