One week before the Austrian Grand Prix, the first day of the Czech Republic Grand Prix was not very productive for the KTM Factory team.
Managing to climb to 11th position thanks to a few good wheels while his teammate carried the red lantern, Pol Espargaro concluded FP2 in 22nd position, two places behind Johann zarco.
An assessment which aroused the anger of the Spaniard who explains, once he has calmed down: “I had a technical problem with the soft tires in the last run of FP2. We're still checking, but it was probably an electronics problem. Without this technical problem, with 95 percent certainty, I would have finished in the top 10 in FP2 today. That bothers me... But we have another opportunity to demonstrate our potential during FP3 on Saturday morning. Hopefully it won’t rain tomorrow morning so we can do better.”
The worst is never certain, but rain is expected from tonight, and it is not obvious that the track on the Czech circuit will be dry tomorrow at 9:55 a.m., but the KTM rider sees the glass half full: “The KTM performs well here, especially with the soft tires which provide much better lap times than the medium and hard tires. However, I was close to the top 10 in FP1 without the soft compound. But the grip with the soft tires is top-notch here, and everyone has improved a lot. We couldn't use them because of the technical problem but I still improved by almost seven tenths of a second compared to the morning before the technical problem in two sectors. If we hadn't been slowed down we would now be on our way to Q2 and I think we could have run a very low 1'56 in FP2. I could have at least done 1'56.2 or 1'56.3. I'm convinced ".
A time which would have placed him in 7th position, half a second ahead of Miguel Oliveira whom he congratulates in passing: “Yes, it’s good that Miguel rode well today.”
From Monday, Pol Espargaró will try new pieces tested by Dani Pedrosa ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix: “We will not use technical updates this Grand Prix weekend. We focus on proven material that we know well. On Monday, we’re going to try all the new things.”
Ranking Czech Republic Grand Prix in Brno FP2:
Classification credit: MotoGP.com
