Raúl Fernández: "When you give everything and there's nothing else, you need to understand"

April 6, 2022

After dazzling last year in his rookie season in Moto2, achieving eight victories and fighting for the title until the last race, Raúl Fernández’s debut in the premier class riding a Tech3 team KTM is proving to be more complicated than expected. previous expectations pointed.

At the moment, the young Spanish rider has not been able to score points in the first three events of the year, although the positive thing is that he has managed to cross the finish line in all of them, always improving his result: 18th in Qatar, 17th in Indonesia and 16th in Argentina. If the progression is maintained, Raúl should already score points in Austin, where the Grand Prix of the Americas is being held this weekend.

For Raúl, the Termas weekend was complicated, since the reduction from three to two days deprived him of opportunities to face the weekend more calmly.

“In general, everything cost us a bit, Argentina is a circuit where I’ve only been twice in my life, and this has been a long time. I’m very happy with how the weekend went and the race I did,” assured the from Madrid.

“Honestly I didn’t have more, I gave 120 percent and I think we have to be happy, if we put it all on a scale I think it was the best race I’ve done since I’ve been in MotoGP, but in the end when you give everything and you don’t have more, what you need is time to continue advancing and understanding things. That’s why I think that little by little we are going to get there”, he valued.

In the key of the race, the Spaniard came to be in the first laps in points positions, but finally he was at the gates of being able to add.

“It was a positive race, the first corner and the first few laps were very good, I gained seven positions, but with a full tank and slipstreams, I wanted to follow Miguel Oliveira, who was in front of him, in order to learn, but I went too far and couldn’t keep me at his wheel,” he explains.

“I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning of the race, the first five or six laps I kept going long and recovering every time, and that’s how the tires got very hot.”

The one from KTM opted to pause and not risk a fall.

“At that moment I decided to catch my breath and I told myself that I needed to calm down, because I was losing a lot of positions. I passed Darryn Binder and tried to follow Alex Marquez, and I was very close to being able to pass him, but in the last few laps I started to suffer with the front rubber and I decided to cut it so as not to fall”.

In a weekend with many difficulties, with only one day of training and the problem of transport, Fernández considers the result good.

“It was a good race, I accumulated a lot of experience, it was full learning, and I can only thank the team for the excellent work they did, the bikes did not arrive until late Friday night and to be able to go out on the track on Saturday practically They didn’t sleep,” recalled the boy from San Martín de la Vega.

Franco Morbidelli, Yamaha Factory Racing, Raúl Fernández, KTM Tech3

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Photo by: MotoGP

Remy Gardner, KTM Tech3, Raul Fernandez, KTM Tech3

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Photo by: MotoGP

Raul Fernandez, KTM Tech3