RODRIGO STORMS HOME TRACK TO CLAIM FIRST POLE WITH GRESINI
After being in the top-three in all previous sessions of the #CatalanGP, Gabriel Rodrigo played his cards right and gave himself and TeamKömmerling Gresini Moto3 the most prominent position on the starting grid for the seventh race of the year. The Argentine rider, who lives few km away from the Montmeló Circuit, scored his maiden Moto3 pole position while giving the new Gresini-Kömmerling partnership the first top qualifying result.
It was a hard-fought Q2 and the #19 rider managed to find the “big” lap-time straight away, before leaving – as agreed with the team – to the others the hard task of bettering the 1’48.450secs lap-time without Rodrigo’s slipstream to use to their advantage.
Riccardo Rossi had an up-and-down day: the Italian will line up on the 28thslot of the grid, but in light of this morning’s crash at Turn 2 this can still be considered a positive result. The rookie from Italy showed a top-15 pace yesterday, so if his fitness condition will hold he might be abl to try a good recovery.
POLE POSITION – GABRI RODRIGO #19
“We had a great lap straight away so we thought it was better not to help anyone else by giving them my slipstream. Maybe we waited a bit too long and lost one last lap, but things went in our favour so I’m very happy with his pole position. We’ve been working really well throughout all weekend – as we’ve been doing for a while now – and with a bit of luck we’re not ahead of everyone else on the grid. I believe it won’t be a very quick race and it will be hard to split the big group. It will be important to stay calm – that’s the part in which we struggle the most – and finally give ourselves a strong race result.”
28º – RICCARDO ROSSI #54
“I was going for a quick lap-time to get direct access to Q2 and with fresh tyres I was too fast entering turn two. I hit my back heavily in the tumble and I was struggling to breathe. After the medical checks I was able to return to the track but quite frankly I couldn’t have done a lot better than this. On-track traffic didn’t help, so we now need to wait until warm-up to make our tyre choice for the race.”
