Aleix Espargaró ended the first day at the Buriram circuit in 3rd place overall and with direct access to Q2. The Spanish rider said he didn’t have high expectations for the weekend in Thailand, but ended up placing his bike and the Aprilia Racing team in the top three in free practice.
In a debrief, the Spanish rider explained his feelings during the first day and whether he could fight for victory as he did at the Catalunya GP.
– ‘I think it’s more complicated to be fighting for the win like in Catalunya, I still don’t have a clear answer, but what matters is that we’re competitive with the hard and medium tires, even though it’s still Friday we’re competitive, I didn’t expect this, but good, I like it. Today we had a team department that was comparing our performance with the others and one of the problems was the position on the seat, so today we changed my position on the bike to have more grip at the rear. We’re experimenting this system for the 2024 bike.
Asked how the team is managing rear tire wear compared to the other teams, Aleix replied: ‘ I did a very fast lap on the 20th lap so that was a good indicator and during the afternoon I didn’t do many laps on the hard and medium tires, even though everyone is going very fast this year. Even though last year there were riders in the race on soft tires, this year I think it will be impossible for that to happen, but we’ll see because the lap times are very high.
Aleix Espargaró was also asked about the incident involving Jorge Martín and Marc Márquez during the morning where an aerodynamic part of Jorge’s bike bounced off Marc. Asked about the possibility of a meeting between the riders and the race direction about the safety of the riders, Aleix replied: ‘Whenever there is contact with the bike these days there will always be something jumping, because we have so many aerodynamic parts on the bike that it will always happen. It happened to me at Assen, so there’s always a chance of it happening, especially in some specific areas of the bike.
The Spanish rider was also very surprised by the times of all the riders on the grid and spoke about the impact this could have during the weekend.
– “It’s unbelievable, it’s crazy. I’ve never seen the times so close, 3 thousandths of a second separating the top 10 is crazy. It means we’ll have to be super precise on the attack lap tomorrow, it’s crazy. I don’t know why we’re so close, there are areas on the straights where the faster bikes can make a difference, turn 3 is very technical and you can make a difference too, but then there’s turn 4 which is very difficult too, so it’s very difficult to give a right answer.’