Twenty-year-old Gabriel Rodrigo has claimed his very first Moto3 pole position after crossing the line at very end of the qualifying session, nailing a 2’08.571 at the Brno MotoGP round.
The Spanish-born Argentine young gun starts his forty ninth Moto3 race tomorrow in the prime spot to hopefully score his maiden podium finish or even a win. The RBA BOE Racing Team pilot’s best race result to date has been two seventh places, which he scored at Assen this year and at the Malaysian Moto3 round last year in October.
.150 seconds behind Rodrigo was Romano Fenati (Marinelli Rivacold Snipers). The Italian rider looked as if he was on target to snare his fourth Moto3 pole position after he was sitting on top of the order for most of the session when he stopped the clock with a 2’09.218 with twenty nine minutes left in the session.
However, the typical Moto3 field got down to business with less than three minutes remaining which saw Rodrigo’s teammate Juanfran Guevara firing to the top for less than one second before Leopard Racing’s Joan Mir pinched provisional pole position. That time of Mir’s was also for a split second when Fenati took over the top with a 2'08.721, before Rodrigo took the chocolates to claim pole position.
Your front row looks like this then. Rodrigo from Fenati from Guevara. This is the first time for the RBA BOE Racing Team taking a 1-3 result in qualifying.
Mir will head the second row of the grid, while Nicolo Bulega will start from fifth place on the grid after he powered his way to a 2'08.971, just a mere .004 seconds off from Mir’s time.
Bulega once again did trowel his #8 SKY Racing Team VR46 machine. This time he crashed at turn eight when the frontend gave way which gave him no warning what so ever.
Dutch rider Bo Bendsneyder (Red Bull KTM Ajo) was sixth fastest and was .052 seconds faster than Del Conca Gresini Moto3’s Fabio Di Giannantonio.
Livio Loi (Leopard Racing) and Philipp Oettl (Südmetall Schedl GP Racing) make up the top ten respectfully.
British Talent Team’s John McPhee, who won last year’s Czech Republic round in wet conditions, will start from 19th place on the grid after he could only manage a 2'09.583 on his fourth lap out of a total of nine.
McPhee did crash in the final minutes of qualifying while he was in a positive eleventh place. “I got going and got my head down in front of the group which I was in and tried to do my own thing. However I had a moment and came back on the track, but was not going that quick and lost the front,”he said.
“I can’t explain it really. Three of us crashed there within seconds, which is kind of the way it’s been going this weekend. The track has been a bit odd.”
