A furious Aleix Espargaro has hit out at MotoGP race control following Saturday’s qualifying for the Valencian Grand Prix having alleged yellow flags were shown in error.
Despite topping practice three in the morning, Aprilia rider Espargaro was last in Q2 and will start the season finale 12th.
He aborted his last flying lap when signals on the new-for-2021 trackside LED light panels informed him that he was entering a yellow flag zone.
Espargaro was left fuming afterwards when he discovered that there was no incident ahead and that the signal had been sent in error.
“In qualifying, I had very bad luck,” he explained.
“I had the crash of Pecco [Bagnaia] in front of me, and then in the last lap there was a big mistake of race direction.
“They put the yellow flags on the straight, on the panels, and there was no crash, nothing.
“[Jorge] Martin went wide celebrating the pole position, but you cannot out yellow flags if there is no one in the gravel.
“I went to race direction because I was very angry, and they just said ‘sorry, sorry, mistake.’
“It can happen, but it ruined my qualifying because I wasn’t able to put in a lap.
“Starting from 12th place will be a little bit more difficult, but I think we have strong pace.”
MotoGP did not reply to a request for comment about Espargaro’s allegation at the time of publication.
It’s not hard to understand why Espargaro was so frustrated, after making a significant breakthrough on Saturday morning with the bike set-up and believing that he was set to go into both qualifying and the race in a much stronger position than he expected.
“I don’t like to talk about what could have been, but it would have been better than 12th,” he added.
“I don’t know about the front row, but it would have been on the second row, 100%.
“I did a 1m30s in the morning with cold temperature so for sure I would have been able to go a little faster in the afternoon. No doubt about it.
“Unfortunately it is like it is, and tomorrow my life will be a little more difficult.
“Starting from 12th place in Valencia isn’t easy because it’s not a good place to overtake.
“I was ready to fight for the podium, but it’ll be more difficult from there.”
Espargaro went into the second day of action deeply frustrated with his performance on Friday, but significant alterations to the RS-GP overnight left him much more competitive when things got underway.
“We made the bike shorter,” he explained of changes to their swing arm pivot height, “we changed the suspension, we added the front disc cover, and we changed a lot of things to try and increase the front tyre temperature.
“We changed a lot of things and it worked. I was immediately fast this morning with the medium race tyre, and with a soft tyre I put in a very good lap.
“In FP4 I had a small crash, but afterwards I took the second bike with the used tyres from the morning, close to 20 laps, and I managed to stay in the high 1m31s laps, which is very good.”
