We had obviously hoped for a much better start to the season, but today wasn’t our day. Whilst our riders’ pace and speed were decent during this morning’s FP, our competitors made a big step on the soft tyre in qualifying. Starting the Sprint from P11 and P17 was always going to be tricky. Fabio had a bad start, and to make matters worse, he then got clipped by another rider on the opening lap. It effectively ended his chances to fight for the points today, although he did still come really close thanks to his strong comeback. Morbidelli started from 17th, which is much further back than we would have liked, but he made up some positions in the race and finished 14th. Clearly, we have work to do as a team to make sure we get better results tomorrow. The Sprint has given us data and ideas of where we can improve. We will have a 10-minute warm-up session to quickly try some last setting amendments, and then we will look to make a strong comeback in the Race.
We had obviously hoped for a much better start to the season, but today wasn’t our day. Whilst our riders’ pace and speed were decent during this morning’s FP, our competitors made a big step on the soft tyre in qualifying. Starting the Sprint from P11 and P17 was always going to be tricky. Fabio had a bad start, and to make matters worse, he then got clipped by another rider on the opening lap. It effectively ended his chances to fight for the points today, although he did still come really close thanks to his strong comeback. Morbidelli started from 17th, which is much further back than we would have liked, but he made up some positions in the race and finished 14th. Clearly, we have work to do as a team to make sure we get better results tomorrow. The Sprint has given us data and ideas of where we can improve. We will have a 10-minute warm-up session to quickly try some last setting amendments, and then we will look to make a strong comeback in the Race.