Miguel Oliveira returned to the top ten with a tenth-place finish at the MotoGP round in Barcelona. However, he faced many problems and difficulties in the main race. So far, the best result for the Trackhouse Racing rider in 2024 is an eighth place, and he believes he can do much better.
A few days after the Catalan GP, the Portuguese rider has some understanding of what went wrong last week: ‘The team analyzed it quite a bit and it seems we are not still balanced with the weight. We’re overloading the front tyre a little bit, so on a track where you don’t have the grip it becomes soon a problem. We also saw a big delta in terms of pace in the beginning of the race, and I just didn’t have any extra grip in the beginning, so I lost a lot of time there. Then many riders, if you see, they didn’t go crazy fast, but just kept the pace, and some others really dropped. We were the ones that dropped, but not that much. It’s obviously disappointing when you know you can do much more. The race was more than 10 seconds faster, we were 14 seconds faster, but everyone is improving at the moment and it seems hard to keep up with everything’.
When asked if what Aprilia is doing for the riders is enough, Oliveira mentioned that he is not asking for more than he can – extracting the maximum with the means available:
– It’s still the same. We have the same structure, the same people. Everyone is doing their best with the tools we have, and that’s the main target and that’s what I can ask: with we have, to do the maximum. Right now I just feel we have a bike that can be much faster, but we are not reaching the potential of the bike. And when that happens it’s always frustrating for both parts, for me and for the team. But we need to put our heads down, because it’s still a lot of races to go and we can shine much more than what we are doing at the moment.