Hot and very humid conditions greeted the MotoGP paddock on Saturday at the Chang International Circuit. Following a dry, but very exciting Friday for the WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team in Thailand, Cal Crutchlow managed to repeat the team’s best Qualifying result today with P5 in Q1, a result that Andrea Dovizioso achieved earlier this season in Austin, Texas.
The Englishman and Yamaha test rider, who is replacing the retired Italian, was giving his all today, after he suffered a heavy highside in yesterday’s FP2 session. Crutchlow went out with pain in his right foot from this morning, but still managed to get a decent job done throughout day two. He concluded the Free Practices in P15 overall and improved his fastest lap time from Friday by 0.339 seconds in Qualifying this afternoon to miss out on an eventual Q2 entry by less than half a second. He will start from the fifth row of the grid tomorrow.
#35 Cal Crutchlow – P15 –
“Obviously today I felt the effects of the injury from yesterday. I woke up not feeling very fresh, that’s sure. But overall, we can be happy with the performance today. I tried my best. In FP3, after what happened yesterday, I was a bit reluctant to push to the limit to try and go to Q2. So, we went into Q1 and to qualify 15th is not so bad. But honestly speaking, we are struggling with the rear grip of the bike this weekend. It’s a little bit due to the nature of the circuit, but also with the Yamaha, we seem to be struggling quite a lot. Therefore, we will look tonight together with the team and the Yamaha engineers, if we can improve this for tomorrow, because I think we can have a good race. My pace is good. I’m happy, but I know we can improve. So, let’s see the situation tomorrow for the race. We have the Warm Up to try a few things. Hopefully the Warm Up is dry or wet, if it’s going to be a wet race to get some time to understand the bike a bit more in these conditions. Overall, I think we have done a good job again this weekend.”
Results Q1 & Q2 combined:
Source: motogp.com, rnfracing.com