Miguel Oliveira showed promise in the first qualifying session of the French MotoGP Grand Prix, but in Q2, he couldn’t go beyond 12th place. Hours later, he finished the Sprint race in 11th, where he struggled to make much progress.
The Trackhouse Racing rider mentioned that he was affected by yellow flags during qualifying, and in the Sprint race, there was an issue with the bike: ‘Honestly it was a good performance in Q1, but then in Q2 with my new tyre I had the yellow flags three laps in a row, so I couldn’t do really much more. And then on the race it was a bit disappointing because I had some kind of issue either with the front tyre or the front-end of the bike – I can’t really say at the moment. But it was something really off. The team is still trying to understand what happened and try to avoid it for tomorrow’.
When asked about the consequences of the problem he mentioned, Oliveira explained: ‘Basically I had huge slides on the front, upright braking and especially in the apex on throttle, so I was about to crash going slow and that’s really strange. I just tried to push and not crash at the same time, so I couldn’t do anything basically. This morning I did 1m31s quite easily and this afternoon to do a 1m32s low I was killing myself to do it. So there was something really off’.
Rain could arrive at Le Mans on Sunday, and the #88 emphasized the need to be prepared for anything: ‘Tomorrow looks quite different from today, so we have to be ready for any condition and try to adapt very quickly to whatever is on track’.