Maverick Viñales landed in Alcañiz with clear ideas: to fight for victory on Sunday. However, his progress was cut short on Saturday morning, when he was unable to get a direct pass to Q2.
Forced to go through the first qualifying practice, Viñales had to force himself to be among the first two, and ended up going to the gravel in the fast and always problematic turn 2. “Over in the two; it could not have been in a slower “, the Aprilia rider joked with the press.
“It was a time-attack , I didn’t have things in place and I still pressed to the limit. The data says that I entered very quickly, but since I did [the curve] well, I played it,” he explained with a laugh. And it is that, although that mistake left him out of the fight for pole and delayed him to sixteenth position, it is Viñales’ first fall so far this year .
But his smile faded as he talked about why he had to go through Q1 . “Today is a day to understand many things,” he acknowledged. “Since the morning I felt bad with the bike, and we didn’t understand why. In FP4 I changed bikes and I went fast again. We have to understand what happened with the second bike, especially facing to morning. I was going faster with used tires on the afternoon bike than with new tires in the morning. It wasn’t normal.”
Looking ahead to tomorrow’s race, ‘Mack’ doesn’t set limits . “I have an open mind. I will go flat out, that’s clear. I think we can have a good race; not the one I expected, but a good result can be done. But the most important thing is to understand why in the morning it didn’t work and at changing bikes I went fast again. In Q2 I crashed because I was very ‘plugged in’, but it is what it is”.
In addition, he believes that there are enough overtaking points to undertake a comeback. ” Today the bike was running quite a lot. I think [the straight] is a point where I can overtake. But the Ducatis run, and I have a few in front of me. But there are many other places where we can overtake, like [curve] twelve , the fourteen… I look good, with desire and motivation, and tomorrow we will go out for all”, concluded the Catalan.
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