Miller: from the announcement to the Aragon performance
On the eve of the Aragon Grand Prix the Pramac team had announced the line-up for the next season, with the promotion of Izan Guevara from Moto2 alongside Razgatlioglu and replacing Jack Miller, who had in turn announced his retirement from MotoGP at the end of the season. On the occasion of the first post-official race, the Australian came close to the top 10, crossing the finish line in 11th place after recovering two positions at the start.
An excellent performance for #43, who commented on his second-best result of this championship after the eighth place achieved in Hungary: “Overall, it was a decent weekend and I gave everything I had in the race – he said – unfortunately, we had to give up some positions to the KTM guys towards the end. I tried to make their life as difficult as possible, but once you lose the advantage, it becomes tough. The bike works quite well, honestly. I can’t complain in the corners. We are just losing too much on the straights, but we know that and there’s not much we can do, so there’s no point complaining. We just have to keep doing what we’re doing. I was really happy with my pace, I made no mistakes and, apart from a small contact on the first lap with Joan, it was a pretty clean race until the end. I knew after yesterday’s Sprint that we had to manage the front tyre better, and I did that today. But when you do that, you lose a bit of rolling speed and that makes things harder. The front stayed good until the end, the rear was good too, and I basically finished the tyres on the last lap, as it should be. Until then, I was quite happy with the performance. Compared to the start of the season, now the bike seems to have improved quite quickly. The bike is good and has a couple of key weak points that, if we manage to fix, would make it competitive. Obviously, when you add 20 horsepower to a bike, its character changes, but considering it’s a completely new bike this year, I think we’ve done a great job improving it in a short time.”
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Razgatlioglu’s crash
The Tuscan team was also very close to a concrete double points finish, where Toprak Razgatlioglu was positioned. However, a mistake made by the latter in the final stages of the race compromised every chance: “For me it was a positive weekend, especially because in Sunday’s race, despite a not-so-brilliant start, we managed to recover ground on the guys ahead. At the beginning I didn’t have a good feeling, but after a few laps I found my rhythm and felt really good on the bike. Unfortunately, towards the end the front tyre started to lose grip and it became difficult to maintain the same pace. I was going wide in almost every corner because the front wheel was locking up and I couldn’t control it properly. I tried to push at the same pace, but it was impossible and in the end I crashed. Without losing the front, I think I could have finished around 12th or 11th place, maybe even 10th. But we learned something this weekend too. Finally, we managed to fight with riders from different manufacturers, whereas before we were mostly alone. This is a really positive step forward for me. Obviously, I’m disappointed with how the last race ended because normally I don’t make this kind of mistake, but we take the positives and look forward to the next race.”
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