The Red Bull KTM Ajo team experienced one of its most difficult Grands Prix at Assen. Its two drivers were far away all weekend, but fortunately made up for it in the race, as is often the case, but that is not enough, and they are aware of having to progress in practice and qualifying in order to really be able to play in front of the Sunday.
Miguel Oliveira encountered difficulties in qualifying since the start of the season, but this time it was also the case during testing. After finishing thirteenth in FP1 and tenth in FP2, he only finished nineteenth in FP3 and could not qualify better than seventeenth.
As with every Grand Prix, he got off to an excellent start and found himself in the top 10 from the second lap of the race. This time, however, he was unable to make it back to the podium and had to settle for sixth place. Despite everything, he remains second in the Championship but is now sixteen points behind: “The weekend was useful for us to learn. We tried to test many options to solve our problem in qualifying and also to understand how we can be better in the race. I'm not completely disappointed with our result because in the end it was the best we could do today, and I'm positive for the future. I know the team is totally focused on finding a good solution for me. We took quite a few points for the Championship and now we have to continue working on this aspect. In Germany we are going to go further. »
For his part, his teammate Brad Binder had a weekend quite similar to the others since the start of the season. Encountering difficulties in practice, it got worse in qualifying before he managed to turn things around in the race. Indeed, after good FP1 finishing in fourth position, he then finished seventeenth in FP2, twenty-first in FP3 then twenty-second in qualifying. Taking advantage of the penalties of certain drivers, he finally started twentieth on Sunday.
After a good warm up in the morning, he was able to move up to seventh place: “The race was difficult. I was coming from a long way away and I knew it was going to be quite complicated. I didn't manage to have a good pace and put in a good fast lap throughout the weekend. I knew that starting twentieth would be a big challenge. I'm happy because during the warm up we were able to progress by finding something better with the bike, which gave me a lot of confidence. In the end, it's good because I was able to ride the bike the way I wanted. Even though the result is not as good as we wanted before the weekend, I think we have made good progress and can leave Assen satisfied. »
