Aleix Espargaró narrowly missed the podium in his final MotoGP Catalan GP. The local rider finished in fourth place after being overtaken by Marc Márquez (Gresini/Ducati) towards the end and was unable to react.
The Spanish Aprilia rider explained that he couldn’t be competitive with the medium tyre: ‘The soft tyre was a lot stronger, but in the Sunday’s race with the medium I never felt good, I never felt strong. I tried everything I could to be competitive, but I couldn’t follow the top guys. At the end I tried my best to stay close to Marc, but I was just sliding, so there was nothing I could do’.
The winner was Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati), ahead of Jorge Martín (Prima Pramac/Ducati), and Espargaró acknowledged the work of both rivals with the tyres: ‘From the beginning, zero grip. I couldn’t touch the throttle. Obviously Pecco and Jorge made a good job, they’ve improved like a hell from the last year, they were extremely fast with the medium tyre and we couldn’t. With the soft tyre I could match them, but with the medium it was impossible’.
Despite trying to manage the tyres well, the #41 couldn’t maintain them, as he explained: ‘I tried to keep the tyre from the beginning, doing tyre saving knowing that at the end would be dramatic. But eventhough, at the middle of the race I had no tyre. I was sliding a lot from the beginning, so I was consuming the tyre. Even if I tried to pick up, but the thing is that at the middle of the race the first two started to fly and wasn’t possible to me to follow’.
Asked whether he considered using the soft rear tyre, Espargaró said: ‘Yes, it was a possibility. In the last part of the Sprint I was still fast, but we considered with Michelin and with my team that our theorical consumption for a full race was too high, it was too risky. So we decided to go with the medium – which is not an excuse: the first and the second on the podium used the medium tyre. But it didn’t work for me’.