This weekend marks Raúl Fernández’s debut with Aprilia at Le Mans and the rider has clear ideas about what he wants to do on track. Reaching directly to Q2 is the goal, with Maverick Viñales as the reference.
In a conversation with the press in French soil, the Trackhouse Racing rider started by saying: ‘It will be my first GP here with Aprilia, unfortunately last year I didn’t have that opportunity due to surgery. I am happy, whenever I have come here I have had fun on the bike, I was fast, so it will be fun to ride here’.
He then revealed what the goals are and where he looks for a reference: ‘Last year was the GP I missed the most and I believe we will have a great reference from last year, Maverick, who was super competitive until the crash. You have to be focused session by session, and the important thing for me is to be competitive in FP1, and try to understand the bike and the track well to be prepared for the qualifying session and be in Q2, that is the goal 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 goal for this race’.
The rider also did not forget what happened in the tests in Jerez: ‘We saw something good in the data and I am excited to test this electronic situation at this track because I believe it will work well with me. I am happy’.
And he explained afterwards the good that he saw: ‘I don’t have to think much about what to do with the electronic issue. We know that in MotoGP, or at least with Aprilia, it is very sensitive from the electronic 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 that I don’t have to think much when I’m riding and we saw that it works well […]’.
