The final day of MotoGP 2021 pre-season testing in Qatar ended up effectively written off due to weather and track conditions.
After wind caused riders problems in the initial two-day test last week, conditions became much more optimal for Wednesday and Thursday’s running, allowing as many as four riders to log times below the existing MotoGP lap record at Losail.
But the weather went in another direction for Friday, with wind blowing sand onto the racing surface and making any prolonged mileage completely pointless.
This created a situation where it’d taken until an hour and a half in for a laptime to be set, that of Tech3 KTM rider Danilo Petrucci, whose sole attempt at a flying lap was seven seconds off the best times of the test.
#dusty pic.twitter.com/6kmAQ5ymqZ
— Danilo Petrucci (@Petrux9) March 12, 2021
Honda’s new recruit Pol Espargaro ventured out a bit later and, in a somewhat humorous turn of events, went five thousandths of a second quicker than Petrucci.
They remained the only riders to set laptimes of any sort until the session was red-flagged for track clean-up efforts soon after the four-hour mark.
Over an hour later the red flag was lifted, and several riders tried their hand at getting some extra mileage in, with Takaaki Nakagami and Brad Binder even getting into the double digits for lap count.
However, Petrucci’s eventual session-topping time – a 1m58.157s – was still nearly four seconds off the test-topping time that Jack Miller had managed on Wednesday, and the majority of riders elected to forgo any Friday running.
Ducati and Yamaha factory riders – seen by many as the likely favourites for the season-opening race – were among those to speak to the media during the seven-hour session, and were rather universally pleased with the amount of work they’d managed to fit into the prior four days.
“The big things were already done, today were a few details that would’ve been good to try – because you can stay 10 days in a track and you’ll always have things to try,” said Fabio Quartararo.
Today’s game. Who will win ? ( I have plenty of +4 😂) / Jeu du jour. Qui va gagner ? ( J’ai plein de +4 ) 😂 pic.twitter.com/ODJj1GmNKP
— Fabio Quartararo (@FabioQ20) March 12, 2021
“Honestly I wanted to ride because when you have the possibility to ride, you say ‘ugh, it’s five days we are here, it’s… not boring but we always ride in the same track’. But actually today that we don’t really ride I’m like ‘ugh, I want to ride so bad’.
“There was nothing really important to try, that’s good, but we wanted to do the race simulation, looks like not possible.
“But I’m happy about the job that we did because I know which bike I will start with in FP1.”
Quartararo did head out after the red flag subsequently, as did team-mate Maverick Vinales – but neither set a time.
