Following mixed conditions on Friday, the Portuguese circuit welcomed the MotoGP field today with bright sunshine. Thereby, both Tech3 KTM Factory Racing riders managed to use the weather well and lowered their lap times significantly with each session, riding their KTM RC16 machines for the first time at the roller coaster track in Portugal this weekend.
While the top of the premier class field moves closer together, Danilo Petrucci likewise caught up a lot today, lowering his Friday’s best by nearly one full second in Q1. The Italian ended up in P8 and will therefore have to start the third Grand Prix of the year from the sixth row of the grid. At the same time, Iker Lecuona made up more than two seconds compared to Friday afternoon and concluded Q1 only 0.206 seconds behind his teammate. He’ll launch off the line at 13:00 local time (14:00 CET) tomorrow from row seven.
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Danilo Petrucci
Position: 18th
Time: 1:40.202
Laps: 8
“We improved a little bit, but I didn’t manage to do a perfect Qualifying. Obviously, I’m not very pleased about my starting position, but I’m happy that we improved our feeling on the bike. It’s quite clear, that I learned something on the bike, which is good.”
“But I want to be further in front. I still have to learn a lot and make kilometers in order to be faster. I think we are quite close to the others, but still behind. So, the target is to get even closer to the front. It’s going to be a challenging race tomorrow.”
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Iker Lecuona
Position: 19th
Time: 1:30.408
Laps: 8
“It was quite good. I improved a lot, with each run, I went a bit quicker and tried to further learn this track with the big bike, as this is definitely not easy. In the beginning, I was struggling a lot more, but now I got the contact to the other riders, so I’m happy.”
“For sure, I need to continue my race preparation during the Warm Up tomorrow morning in order to keep that fast pace. Still, I’m very optimistic and I think we can do a decent race tomorrow.”
