Jorge Martin is clearly the standout rider of the day, but not for the best reasons: 10th place in today’s race in Qatar left the spaniard 21 points behind Francesco Bagnaia, and in analysing his performance the Pramac rider admitted that he even… laughed.
‘At a certain point I started laughing because they didn’t beat me on the track, because with the same conditions I’m confident I could win today. […] I’m also frustrated because I think I deserve this championship too and I lost it to a large extent today’, Martin told the press at the Qatari circuit.
The rider was then asked if anything could be done to avoid problems like this in the future, to which he replied: ‘I don’t think there’s any need to understand what happened because I don’t think they want to decide the championship: they want to be competitive, I hope and believe that they want the same conditions for us, but… I lost 1.5s of pace in one day. I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to ride. I think they have to improve and analyse why this happened so that it doesn’t happen again in the future, and I hope that I can fight for more championships in the future, but today I feel a bit lost because it’s more difficult now’.
Faced with the 21-point gap that now separates him from Bagnaia, the spaniard guaranteed that he won’t give up: ‘I think we can still do it. We’ll get to Valencia and see if we can be competitive. It’s a track I really like and where I’ve been very fast in the past. We’ll see, it’s easy to recover points now as we saw today, I lost a lot, so if I win both races in Valencia I might have a small chance of winning, but now the question is how this tyre has changed my path to the title because I think I was capable of recovering points today’.