Jorge Martín kicked off the MotoGP season with a victory in the Qatar GP Sprint race and a new lap record in Losail – thus leading the championship for the second time in his career.
The Prima Pramac rider expressed his satisfaction with Saturday’s performance but admitted that there are rivals who seem to be more competitive in race pace: ‘For sure today was a great day. I started doing the lap record, it was an amazing lap. And then during the Sprint for sure to start the season like this is great. I hope that I can keep that lead for more than 24 hours unlike Indonesia! But it’s still a long season, so it doesn’t concerns me quite a lot. Hopefully we can improve, because I feel Brad [Binder] and Aleix [Espargaró] have a better pace at the moment, so let’s see if we can keep them behind tomorrow’.
Regarding his chatter issues, Martín stated: ‘I think quite early in the race I started to have some problems. I don’t want to speak a lot about it because I don’t know if I can. But for sure I cannot ride perfectly, I felt a bit too much on the limit. We have some ideas for tomorrow, but is quite tight to try in the warm-up and then it’s the race, so tomorrow will be a difficult race’.
The Spaniard admitted that he expects to have more difficulties with chattering in tomorrow’s race: ‘I think will be much worse. We didn’t have the problem during these days. Also yesterday we didn’t practice in the evening. Tomorrow the long race depends, because sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. Let’s see’.