Joan Mir felt he had a chance to finish MotoGP Practice at this weekend’s Solidarity Grand Prix of Barcelona inside the top-10 before a late crash.
Mir had abandoned his first run when he was following Jorge Martin when the Pramac Ducati rider pitted at the end of the lap.
Mir felt that he would have been better going into the pits and taking a new tyre to stick with Martin on the second run, but when he changed tyre he found himself with less grip, and, trying to make up for that, he crashed at turn 10.
“I crashed with the last tyre,” Mir said. “I could be a little bit more competitive. But we have to understand what happened, because with the first tyre I had a very good feeling, I was able to be quite strong.
“I was able to come very fast in the lap that I went [into the pits], that was for me the best lap that I could do today.
“I saw that the bike was behaving well, I see that I tried to follow the wheel of [Jorge] Martin and when I see that Martin was going into the box I say that ‘Okay, I prefer to try again with a new tyre, I have margin, so let’s try to improve the lap time’.
“Then, for some reason, the grip [with the second tyre] was not the same, not by far the same.
“I tried to do a little bit more on the brakes to compensate for that lack of grip, and I crashed. We will try to understand for tomorrow.
“I think today we could have a possibility to go into Q2.”
Part of Mir’s problem in a time attack scenario is that his natural riding style doesn’t work with the RC213V in its current form, and when pushing for one fast lap it’s harder to make the conscious decisions to adjust his technique to suit the bike that he’s able to do during a race.
“With a used tyre, everything is much more slow, you are able to think a bit more about what you have to do,” Mir explained.
“ With a new tyre, it comes to me to ride more natural, and it’s when this problem happens.
“So, I’m trying but it’s not easy to change your style from one day to the other, because then they make something on the bike and [I]have to go back to my natural style. But this is a little bit what is happening at the moment.”
Mir was one of many riders on Friday to have been surprised by a lack of grip on the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya’s surface despite the temperatures being much cooler than MotoGP usually experiences at the Barcelona venue, which traditionally hosts the Catalan Grand Prix in the early summer,
“Cold temperatures I expected more grip,” Mir said.
“But it’s very difficult to make the tyres work. With the soft [compound] rear it’s a little bit better, but still something that the grip is very low on this track.”
This low grip will make the tyre choice for the races difficult, according to Mir.
“It will be difficult to understand,” he said. “Tomorrow, we will try to put more laps into the soft [compound] tyre to understand the drop, because all the tyres spin a lot here — the medium spins a lot, but also the consumption is high because it spins a lot.
“So, we have to understand with the soft: this will be the key for the race, because here if you have a drop you drop two seconds.”
