Ecstatic after defending the first position tooth and nail until the end of the race, Fabio Quartararo forcefully led the honor roll at the Sachsenring.
The French driver managed to cope, for 30 laps, with the extreme conditions of the German track, in a race of wear and tear in which he was forced to rely on his medium rear tire. “I feel very tired, I’ve felt bad all weekend, with a lot of coughing, I’m speechless,” he said after finishing the race.
“It was much worse than in Indonesia, even worse for me, who was first all the race.”
So much so, that the French driver ventured to compare the German event with an endurance test. “It seemed like an endurance race. But it’s incredible to be able to win on a circuit that I’ve never really liked. It was a very good race.”
“The hardest thing to manage is when you’re a second away, like at the beginning, when you could throw more. However, I knew that with the soft last year I wasn’t going to hold out. The rubber has soaked in much more than expected.”
The French driver took risks and focused his bet on the medium rear tires, unlike the rest of the drivers. With the exception of Joan Mir and Pol Espargaró, who shared the risk with the Frenchman, Quartararo’s tires made the difference at the Sachsenring.
“I like to be different. Everyone was on a hard tire and I knew if we wanted to make a difference we had to. The pace was lower for everyone, and I felt better on the medium [rear] tire. ]”.
This decision surprised the rest of the drivers, including the pillars of his own team.
“This morning, when the Michelin engineer came and told me that I had the medium, just like Joan [Mir] and Pol [Espargaró], my chief mechanic looked at me a bit strangely, but I decided to stay that way” , he concluded.
