The MotoGP French Grand Prix is next for Miguel Oliveira in the season. After achieving his best result of the year in Jerez about two weeks ago, the Trackhouse Racing rider aims to continue on the right track.
As he was injured at the time, #88 didn’t compete in Le Mans in 2023 and will thus ride an Aprilia bike there for the first time. However, he ensured that this doesn’t justify a different approach:
– I don’t think so. I think it’s just a matter of dealing in a normal way as we do all weekends. There is not any particular thing that we have to pay attention to when we come and we haven’t ridden the Aprilia bike the previous season – also because it’s such a different bike anyway that doesn’t really matter the experience from the previous season. So it’s just the normal approach.
After the recent test in Jerez, Oliveira will use some of the solutions found, as he revealed: ‘Yes, a couple of things – especially suspension and rear shock ideas that we’ve tested in Jerez, we’ll have them here. And then we didn’t test any big kind of part that was giving us a huge advantage, so we’ll leave that to another occasion. But for now we just use here the suspension ideas that we’ve tested’.
Le Mans is a more stop-and-go circuit due to the nature of the layout, but «Falcão» believes that the Aprilia RS-GP won’t have any problems: ‘I think it’s coming quite good. You see [Maverick] Viñales doing the race he did in Texas and it’s… not your typical stop-and-go track because the long braking points are long, but the track is also very wide. Here is a bit narrower – quite a bit. And you spend a lot of time straight braking. I think we are not in such a critical situation as the last season, so I hope we can be competitive. I don’t think the bike is going to hold us back from a good performance’.