Britain’s Cal Crutchlow is optimistic he can pull off a result at tomorrow’s Jerez MotoGP round tomorrow and thinks he will be in a battle with the works Ducatis and maybe Valentino Rossi if he doesn’t find his usual warm-up magic bullet.
Crutchlow will start the race from seventh on the grid after selecting the wrong front tyre in qualifying two which messed up his thre-stop strategy as the soft-compound Bridgestone was destroyed after a lap and he didn’t have time to change it.
“I need to improve in qualifying. Normally it is one of my great areas. I feel I can still do one fast lap like I used to be able to but at the minute it’s not ben the best run. Today I chose the wrong front tyre, it was my own fault, I chose the softer front tyre and should have chosen the harder as after the first lap it was wrecked,” said Crutchlow, speaking at Jerez.
“I ran the three-stop strategy but couldn’t change the front as we didn’t have time. I should have scrapped the middle run and changed to a hard in the last run but that’s with hindsight. I should have been quicker and wasn’t, I also made a mistake on my last lap in two corners and lost three-tenths to Marc which would have put me on the front row.
“I am quite optimistic, our pace is good, we struggle more in the heat with the Honda more than Yamaha. They say they struggle more but they don’t. We can enter the corner still really well but what we give up mid-corner and exit is more than they give up in braking.
“I think our battle will be with the Ducatis tomorrow, if we can ride well, then with Valentino but you never know with him, he could come out tomorrow and do a run that is five seconds faster than everyone else at the end of the race. It is difficult to know.
“I am close to running the hard tyre as my laptimes in free practice four were done with the hard rear tyre. When I changed back to the soft, I had a worse feeling. If I can hang in at the start with the hard, then at the end it will be good.”
