Miguel Oliveira arrives to the MotoGP Qatar Grand Prix after two retirements. Despite the hard period in the season, the CryptoDATA RNF MotoGP Team rider believes he can be competitive in Losail, although he maintains moderate expectations.
The Portuguese rider told the press this Thursday: ‘It’s gonna be an interesting weekend with the tyre choices and also maybe the temperatures being slightly different from afternoon to evening. We’ll get into that tomorrow and find out what could be the best tyre compromise to use and especially get our visuals on the track because it does change quite a lot by having a lot of things around it. But the layout is the same, so it shouldn’t be that hard’.
In 2022, Aleix Espargaró battled for the podium in Qatar, but Oliveira is cautious about using that as a reference: ‘Aleix last year… it was also the first race, so I don’t know how much we can take that into account. We come here now at the end of the season, obviously with much more work done and I think everyone is a little bit more dialed-in with the settings than at the beginning of the season. So, if you are good, you maybe can stand out more’.
Despite keeping his feet on the ground, #88 was optimistic about the possibility of being competitive in this penultimate round of the year: ‘By saying that, I don’t want to have our expectations too high, but it’s one of the tracks where we spend much time braking on angle, turning, you do need power, but it’s just down the straight. We’ve seen Yamahas being super competitive here in the past. So, I think we can also be competitive not having the strongest engine. We have a good chance to feel that tomorrow’.