After saying that Honda has been improving, despite some of these results aren’t being seen quite clearly, Joan Mir highlighted the fact that the competition seems to have improved a lot, which doesn’t look like the case of Honda.
The former world champion, then with Suzuki, began his analysis of what happened today, with the qualification in mind: ‘It was an intense day. In the morning I felt quite bad with the bike, I didn’t have a good feeling. Then we improved a little bit and in the qualifying I was able to make a step forward. The lap times are not bad, the ones we did in the qualifying. But it’s clear that everyone is improving a lot’.
He then recalled how intense and faster the current lap times are and, while everybody else seems to be getting better, on Honda’s case, it doesn’t feel like it: ‘Not so long ago, running in the low 58s would put you fifth, on the second row. This year, I started 16th with that time. It kind of shows how everyone is improving, how everyone else is improving. And we don’t seem to have improved at all since last year’.
Mir got later to speak of his race and how he actually got to improve after «missing» the start: ‘In the race, it wasn’t my best start, I didn’t find the right line to overtake. I went to the outside and I touched myself, then I lost a little bit of rhythm. Then I didn’t feel bad, I overtook Pol, I got in Pol’s way a little bit, he was in front. And it’s a bit like everyone tells you: when you’re behind someone, the tyre gets hot’.
As said earlier this week, also by Marc Marquez, when behind others the RC213V starts to have more issues: ‘And for us, without grip, the problem is accentuated, because you can’t brake and you can’t accelerate well. So it becomes a big challenge to ride this bike in those temperatures. And it ended in a crash. Then I got up, and I saw that I was riding in 0 low, 9 high. I think that was a bit of a pace to be in 8 to 12, which is where I think we could be’, before concluding:
– The easy thing to do would have been to take the bike back to the box and say ‘Tomorrow will be another day’. But I wanted to finish the race for me, to get the feeling and to get some information for tomorrow’s race. That’s it. That’s all I have to stay with.