Reigning MotoGP World Champion Jorge Lorenzo took a gamble with Michelin’s soft tyre in today’s Qatar MotoGP, opting for the soft compund on the advice of his tyre techncian after he had seen Marc Maruez’ pace during warm-up.
Lorenzo was worried the softer option would suffer a big drop in grip towards the end but the opposite proved to be true and he set the fastest lap three from the end - the only rider to break into the 1’54s in the 22 laps.
“The fact that I was not very fast in the warm-up, having a lot of problems to keep the pace, looking at Marc who was using the soft tyre and who was faster and faster, made me question which tyre I had to choose,” said Lorenzo, speaking in Qatar.
“I decided to go with the soft one and usually a soft tyre will be worse at the end of the race, but it was the opposite, it was better and better – not with the sliding because at the beginning of the race I was sliding a lot – but it was impressive in the last few laps.
“Even with the pressure of Andrea, we made the difference a little bit in the last three laps and finally when Marc passed Dovizioso, the difference was one second and I could breathe a little bit more easily. Winning is much better than one thousand words and today I spoke on the track.
“Michelin told me the soft tyre will move more than the hard one but the performance will keep more or less the same, so the fact that I was quite slow in the warm-up made me take this risk because I saw some guys were using the soft one on the warm-up and they were faster than me. I knew that we must choose the other option.”
