Quartararo Battles Pain to Take Aragon Pole

17-10-2020

Quartararo Battles Pain to Take Aragon Pole

Fabio Quartararo takes tenth MotoGP pole in Aragón, Franco Morbidelli fourth.

After a dramatic FP3 crash, PETRONAS Yamaha Sepang Racing Team’s Fabio Quartararo put in an heroic performance at MotorLand Aragón, to take his tenth MotoGP pole position. Team-mate Franco Morbidelli will be starting the Aragon GP from the second row, after qualifying fourth.

Quartararo started the MotoGP FP3 session strongly, placing his Yamaha YZR-M1 at the sharp end. However, a Turn 14 crash in the final ten minutes prevented him from ending the session, as he visited the medical centre to confirm that nothing was broken. His time from yesterday was still good enough to secure a Q2 place. Despite experiencing hip pain, the Frenchman put in a brave and impressive ride in qualifying to take his tenth MotoGP pole position, with a 1min 47.076secs lap.

Morbidelli proved to be the man to beat in FP3, after setting an impressive 1min 47.859secs lap in the closing minutes of the cold session. This placed him top in FP3, second overall and secured a Q2 spot. The Italian continued his good form in qualifying and looked set to join his team-mate on the front row of the grid, unfortunately a small mistake in his final flying lap meant that his 1min 47.317secs lap placed him fourth.

Fabio and Franco’s Warm Up session tomorrow will now take place one hour later, at 11am local time (5pm MYT), with the 23-lap MotoGP race due to get underway at 3pm local time (9pm MYT).

Fabio Quartararo

"I was sore on the right from yesterday, and now on the left from today. I’m not feeling great, but on the bike though it is not too bad. Normally the new tyres are good, but today we had a big drop in grip with the rear and that was really strange. The team will analyse this for sure and try to figure out why. I’m really happy though as all through FP4 I was feeling okay, I was able to do a long run and I have the pole position. Let’s hope for a great race tomorrow; we still need to work on the pace, but we’re not too far off what we want. I think starting later tomorrow is the correct thing to do because it is really cold in the morning, starting later is best for the safety of all riders. I think we can fight for the podium, but we need to see tomorrow what happens."

Franco Morbidelli

"I was hoping to be on the front row, but maybe we didn’t use the right front tyre in qualifying. Starting on the second row is still a positive thing and we can aim to have a good race from here. We have been able to try many things today, which means we have a good amount of data to analyse to help us make the right choice tomorrow. At the moment I prefer to run the soft tyres, but we will see what is best for the race and look at the other options available. From today’s pace and the weekend so far I think we have a good chance of being on the podium tomorrow."