It was an ecstatic Jorge Lorenzo at the parc ferme after today’s excitiong battle to the wire between himself and rival Casey Stoner.
The Yamaha rider ended Stoner’s three year pole position dominance in Qatar (2009, 2010 and 2011) and grabbed his 45th career pole position and his 19th in MotoGP.
It wasn’t easy as it seemed for Lorenzo who had to use the ‘martillo’ on his Yamaha M11 and take it over the limit to top Casey Stoner.
The M1 is extremely well balanced, it may be lacking a little something in top speed which has never been its forte – Stefan Bradl grabbing a tow from Lorenzo nearly bumped into him a couple of times on the straight – but the Spaniard is extremely effective in corner entry and exit that makes up for the rest.
“I am really happy with tonight’s result.
I had to push more than 100% to make pole position but I pushed to the limit and managed to make a perfect lap.
We still have to improve the power on the straight and our maximum speed but in the rest of the track the bike is working really well.
Tomorrow will be a tough race and tyres will be very important I think.
A big thank you to Yamaha and my team for giving me such a good bike!” said Lorenzo.
Two crashes in two day’s would dent anyone confidence especially the spectacular and scary one (reminiscent of the late Marco Simoncelli’s) that Ben Spies had tonight, but that’s not worrying the American, it’s trouble with his front end that he says he’s been having – which he never mentioned before.
“We were on a good lap until the crash, I just lost the front.
I’ve been complaining the last couple of days that the front end just didn’t have the right feeling that I wanted.
As I was trying to get away from the bike when I was sliding something got caught up and I went with it.
I was looking at the front wheel for a while and thought about trying to get back on when I couldn’t get away from it! We’ll try to make the bike better now, I know if we can fix it we can be up front.
The M1 is clearly going round the track fast and I feel good on it apart from that.
We’ve got some good ideas to try in warm up so we’ll see.
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