Viñales won the Qatar GP in 2021 with Yamaha, something he had already done in 2017 and also during his time in Moto3, in 2012.
After a solid pre-season with the Aprilia 2022, Viñales has spent the entire Losail weekend without finding the best pace, and could not get past 19th place on the grid, while his teammate Aleix Espargaró was fifth, with almost a second of advantage.
Asked by Motorsport.com if he expected the Qatar weekend to be as difficult as it has been so far, Viñales admitted that he hadn’t, but “can’t start crying”.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect it,” he said. “For sure I wasn’t expecting it, honestly I was expecting to be up front and be a lot quicker.”
“But it’s what we have right now, so we can’t do anything. We can’t start crying, we have to start working, that’s what we’re doing.”
“This Saturday we tried things that worked on the pace in long runs but not on fast lap. So on Sunday we will try other things, but we have to keep trying until we find a good set-up for us.”
Expanding on the issues that led to his difficult qualifying, Viñales says he still has issues with the front end of the 2022 Aprilia RS-GP.
The one from Roses (Girona) says that the problem is “even bigger” than in the pre-season tests and that finding a solution is complicated by the lack of time available on the track during a race weekend.
“Honestly, in the tests I was suffering a lot with the front end,” he added. “And here it’s even bigger, so my problem comes from the front.”
“I lose the lead all the time and I can’t push, especially with new tyres. With used tyres, it improves a lot, but with new tyres, I have a lot of problems.”
“We have to test, and in a race weekend you can’t test every session, you only have 40 minutes. So, in the end, we can’t change too much,” concluded Maverick Viñales.
Espargaró believes his qualifying lap was “perfect” and is confident in his bike for the race.
“I am happy, I have confidence in myself,” he said. “On Saturday morning maybe I took too much risk because I decided to work for the race and not put on a soft tire [to look for a good time] and I was on the verge of an error because due to the problems I had on the fastest lap on Friday, I was in a bit of a crisis area”.
“So I can hardly qualify in the top 10. I did a good job preparing the bike for the race, I did 23, 24 laps on the rear race tire in FP4 as well, so I’m happy.”
“Then in qualifying I did it all, I did two consecutive laps in a low 1:53, which is going pretty fast. I honestly think it was very difficult to be more competitive than I was.”
“It’s not often that with a competitive bike you feel like you were very close to the limit of the bike. And I felt like I used every inch of the bike or the track, I did a perfect lap.”
