Miguel Oliveira finished the MotoGP Thai Grand Prix sprint race in 17th place, starting from 20th. The initial recovery seemed promising, but he encountered an incident involving two other riders.
The Portuguese rider from the CryptoDATA RNF MotoGP Team explained that after this situation, he was unable to make a further recovery: ‘It wasn’t a bad start. In the first two laps I managed to get up a couple of position. Then, I had an incident with [Franco] Morbidelli and [Maverick] Viñales at turn three. Morbidelli overtook me, he took me wide, I made the comeback, but so did Viñales on both of us, so Viñales hit me and I hit Morbidelli. It broke my wing, airbag off… so I’ve lost a bit of time there and then I couldn’t just recover to fight for anything else’.
On the other hand, Oliveira described the feelings of riding with his suit airbag off: ‘My airbag has lot of hair and I’m short. You try to fight and it’s like riding a naked bike, getting all this wind. Half a lap later it was OK’.
Regarding what his race could have been without the incident with Morbidelli and Viñales, #88 admitted that he shouldn’t have a much better result: ‘I can tell you that probably with no crashes would be 14th. With all the crashes, maybe a little bit better. But I think 14th. So, for the main race we’ll try to get a little bit more work done. Still the tyres are not completed decided, but from the feeling today I’m hesitant especially about the front. But we’ll analyse this afternoon and probably with the longer race will be better for me’.