The 2023 MotoGP World Championship is a continuous swing. When the balance seems to start to tip to one side, the response from the other contender arrives promptly. In Sepang, Pecco Bagnaia seemed to have definitively found the right fit, but in Lusail only Jorge Martin’s Sprint was enough to halve the gap in the standings, already guaranteeing the certainty of keeping the World Championship open until next week, when the grand finale will take place in Valencia.
But for “Martinator” this is a major success, especially because in yesterday’s practice and qualifying it didn’t look like it always did. He wasn’t able to express all his explosiveness astride his Prima Pramac Racing Ducati, but the moment the traffic lights went out the music definitely changed and he demonstrated it immediately, with the determination with which he overtook for two times his rival after a not too brilliant start. Then he managed the tires perfectly to go on to score his eighth success of the season in a Sprint. For the Madrid native, therefore, the ability to get out of trouble that he showed today was very important.
“I didn’t have a good start. I had to recover and understand what to do to go faster than the others. But the leap I managed to make between yesterday and today I think is a really good thing. I expected to have something more in race and I don’t know why we suffered so much in qualifying. But I’m happy because we understood that we can do it”, said Martin when he spoke to Sky Sport MotoGP.
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Jorge Martin, Pramac Racing
One of the keys to the turnaround was the hard rear tyre, which helped him straighten out a weekend that had been more complicated than he would have expected. “Yesterday when I put on the hard tire it was the first tire I managed to make work, because up to that point nothing had worked. So I was confident I could be very fast with the hard tire on the rear today.”
“I had many doubts about the front, but the truth is that the start wasn’t good, but then I saw that, even if I managed the tyres, the others didn’t go away from me. Marini and Alex Marquez on the other hand were using them enough and when I saw that they were starting to struggle so I decided to pass and try to open a gap. On the last lap, when ‘Diggia’ was approaching, I was pushing really hard, but it was a risk I had to take, because every point counts “.
The Spaniard also commented on the rather “male” overtaking against Bagnaia in the early stages of the race, when there was also a slight contact between the two: “It was a ‘close’ overtaking. It’s a complicated corner and I went inside, but he wanted to try to resist on the outside. But I was on the inside, so it was easier for me to make the turn. I didn’t like that there was contact, but I don’t think it was a crazy maneuver.”
He made the point on the ranking situation instead with the media present in the press room, underlining the cruciality of tomorrow’s long race for the title race: “The objective was to recover points and we achieved it. But I think that tomorrow will be a great day for me and for Pecco. Depending on how tomorrow goes, it will be a different story in Valencia. For me it will be crucial to get even closer there. Today we showed that we are in a good position, we hope to exploit it tomorrow too.”
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