The sun was shining bright over the Motorland Aragon on Saturday again, although proceedings didn’t go according to plan for the WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team with Cal Crutchlow registering a first crash towards the end of Free Practice three this morning. Luckily he escaped his crash unharmed. Yamaha test rider Crutchlow, taking over the Yamaha YZR-M1 from this weekend until the rest of the season, made a step in FP3 this morning to go 0.578 seconds faster than on Friday afternoon. He was missing out on the top by less than a second and went 0.412 seconds faster again in Qualifying one. Yet, he was slowed down on his final time attack due to other riders crashing, which meant he couldn’t further improve on his P19 in Qualifying overall.

#35 Cal Crutchlow – P19 –

“Today was not a bad day. I feel we improved my pace a little bit, but unfortunately, we didn’t take advantage of that in FP3 or the Qualifying 2 today. We had a little bit of an issue that held us back to be able to really make a lap time. The good thing is, the potential was higher, but again, it was nice to be out there. I felt myself a little bit more competitive out there today, which was good fun. Obviously, with having six races, I need to get myself in the frame of mind to push and have a bit of competitiveness in me. Unfortunately, I crashed at the end of FP3, but we completely understand why. We’ll look forward to try to improve the bike for tomorrow’s race because as of yet we haven’t touched one setting of the bike. It has been the same in every session, which was our plan. We changed the electronics quite a lot over the sessions and this was why we didn’t touch the bike yet. Hopefully tonight we can improve for tomorrow.”

Results Q1 & Q2 combined:

Source: motogp.com, rnfracing.com