On the first day of the Qatar MotoGP Grand Prix, Miguel Oliveira was 12th in the inaugural session at Losail – the only one with dry weather – before finishing 20th in the second. The Trackhouse Racing rider opted not to use the new rear section of the Aprilia RS-GP, just like Maverick Viñales (Aprilia), with Aleix Espargaró (Aprilia) being the only one to use it.
The Portuguese rider clarified his decision: ‘So, first of all during the test we’ve been trying to do some back checks with it, but it seems like the new seat, probably – and it’s just my theory – just because of the different heights and body positioning, probably the seat is affecting more us than Aleix because of his height and probably the way he positions the body. Anyway, the difference is not that high, but we prefer just to go forward with the test with something that we already knew. And that’s the only reason really. I guess once we are a little bit more centered with everything, we’ll try to do it. But we didn’t had loads of days to test and it wasn’t a black and white thing. So we kind of used what we knew’.
Asked if the change in the seat justified the improvements he found at the end of the tests, Oliveira explained: ‘The seat helped, but there were other geometry changes, basically trying to get the bike a bit more calm changing direction also, just to take advantage of the good corner speed that the bike allows you to do. But you need to have a very stable bike. It needs to pitch also, so it’s just try to find that compromise. And still today on the dry practice we found probably another small step that we can do in that direction, so I was really looking forward to the evening practice. But I guess we’ll see tomorrow’.