Franco Morbidelli continued his streak of strong performances with a sixth-place finish at the MotoGP Australian GP. The Prima Pramac rider even found himself fighting for a top-five position but couldn’t maintain the momentum until the end.
The Italian admitted that his tire management might not have been ideal: ‘It was a solid race, it was a solid weekend again. I had a great potential at the beginning of the race, and I could stay with the top guys. But then, maybe I was using the tyre too much and I wore it a little bit too much. And then, I needed to make a step back and to drop my pace’.
Despite not being able to stay in the fight for higher positions, Morbidelli was satisfied with sixth place, given the circumstances: ‘I was able to raise my pace, and finally I got in the fight for P4, but I couldn’t get it, and I was sixth – which is a pleasant result anyway, considering the struggles that I had in the past at this track, and considering how the weekend went – we didn’t have a lot of time to set the bike well’.
The #21 rider also acknowledged that having less time to work on the bike due to the cancellation of the first free practice session impacted him more than others: ‘It seems that we paid this a little bit more than everybody else; we were a bit slower in increasing the speed throughout the weekend. But it’s a positive weekend all in all’.