This weekend marks Raúl Fernández’s debut with Aprilia at Le Mans and the rider has very clear ideas about what he wants to do on the track. Getting right away to Q2 is the objective, and Maverick Viñales is the reference.
Speaking to the press on French soil, the Trackhouse Racing rider began by saying: ‘It will be my first GP here with Aprilia, unfortunately last year I didn’t have that opportunity due to surgery. I’m happy, every time I’ve been here I’ve had fun on the bike, I’ve been fast, so it’s going to be fun to ride here’.
He then revealed what his goals are and where he looks when looking for a reference: ‘Last year was the GP I missed the most and I believe we will have a great reference from last year, the Maverick, which was super competitive until the crash. You have to be focused from practice to practice, and the important thing for me is to be competitive in FP1, and trying to understand the bike and the track well to be prepared for the real practice and being in Q2, that’s the objective now. In this category you have to be in a good position on the grid to try to do something good in the race and that is the objective for this race’.
The spaniard still hasn’t forgotten what happened in the tests in Jerez: ‘We saw something good in the data and I’m excited to test this electronic situation on this track because I think it will work well for me. I am happy’.
And he then explained the good thing he saw: ‘I don’t have to think too much about what to do with the electronic part. We know that in MotoGP, or at least with Aprilia, it is very sensitive from an electronics point of view, and I believe that it is working very well and has improved a lot in the last three or four years, but it is also difficult to understand the electronic part. We tried in Jerez to look at it in a different way, with the same character but in a way where you don’t have to think too much as a rider and we saw that it works well […]’.