Jorge Martin has taken third in his debut race with Team Del Conca Gresini Moto3 after an exciting performance at the Losail International Circuit in Qatar. The 18-lap encounter that opened up the 2017 Moto3 title chase also saw a great display of riding by Fabio Di Giannantonio, who made his way up to the front from fifteenth on the grid, eventually crossing the line in eighth place.<\/p>\n
Starting from pole, Martin was able to maintain his position for the first two laps; even when he dropped the lead, the young Spaniard never lost touch with the front of the field as he found himself in the usual heavily-populated group of riders battling for honours. Despite losing a little bit of ground in the final stages, he managed to bridge the gap with the top-4 and get back in contention for a podium finish, which he sealed at the chequered flag.<\/p>\n
Di Giannantonio put together a great recovery from row five: with some competitive lap-times \u2013 one of which turned out to be the fastest one of the whole race – and a great race craft, the Italian rider went past several opponents up to the sharp-end of the field, as he briefly took the lead of the encounter as well. In the last-lap slipstream lottery, Di Giannantonio ended up with an eighth-place finish and some great confidence heading into the next race of the year.<\/p>\n
It was a masterful performance for both riders, as team manager Fausto Gresini points out: \u201cIt was not an easy race but surely one to remember, as things could have gone wrong at any moment. Martin did a remarkable job especially when the grip dropped down: we knew it could have happened but he was ready for it. Fabio was also great in recovering so many positions; he did not have enough track-time here so we had to take a bit of a gamble in terms of bike set-up, but it paid off. We leave Qatar in a really happy mood.\u201d<\/p>\n
3\u00ba – JORGE MARTIN #88<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really quick in the early part of the race and I felt I had something more than my opponents; I tried to pull away with Joan (Mir), but that wasn\u2019t possible. In the second part of the race things started to become less predictable: I started to lose some grip and dropped down to 6th<\/sup>\/7th<\/sup> place, but then I was able to bridge the gap to the lead again. I push as hard as I could to stay in touch with Joan but McPhee made a couple of mistakes and that allowed him to pull away that bit. We leave Qatar with a pole position, a lot of points and a podium, so I\u2019m happy!\u201d<\/p>\n 8\u00ba – FABIO DI GIANNANTONIO #21<\/p>\n “I\u2019m really happy. Given how things went this winter, today we did an incredible race. Last year I was 32 seconds away from the winner, today only 0.8s. We did the fastest lap, which is a great sign considering our performance in free practice. We will aim for more next time!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jorge Martin has taken third in his debut race with Team Del Conca Gresini Moto3 after an exciting performance at the Losail International Circuit in Qatar. The 18-lap encounter that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-moto3-en","category-race-report-moto3-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n