Team Suzuki Ecstar’s Aleix Espargaro ended today’s 19-lap Malaysian Grand Prix a disappointing 13th due to a misdirection in rear tyre choice and an overall lack of wet weather pace.
The Spanish rider had been having a really strong weekend up to Sunday. Espargaro was competitive in the dry practice sessions and qualified a decent seventh in the damp conditions on Saturday afternoon.
With a torrential downpour materialising just moments before the race was set to start, the track was completely saturated and Espargaro decided that the softer wet Michelin rear tyre was the best option as he expected the circuit to remain soaked throughout.
However, the rain had stopped by lights out and the track steadily began to dry over the course of the 19-lap contest. Espargaro began to feel this only a handful of laps into the race, and he made a mistake at the first corner on the third lap whilst running in the battle for the podium in fifth place. This set the tone for the rest of his afternoon, and the Spaniard dropped to a lowly 13th.
Whilst Espargaro’s tyre choice played a hand in his downfall this afternoon, he also attributes his poor race to the GSX-RR’s lack of competitiveness in the wet. This has been an issue that has plagued the team all season, though there have been signs of improvement in this area in recent races, most notably at Silverstone when his teammate Maverick Vinales qualified on the front row in dodgy conditions.
“I’m disappointed with the final result because the weekend overall had been positive, but then in the race I couldn’t feel competitive. I decided to go with a soft rear tyre, hoping the conditions of the track would stay wetter, but at the end this proved to be the wrong choice,” he said.
“From the very beginning I realised that my performance was not good and I lost the feeling with the grip right after four-or-five laps. I also made a couple of mistakes, and doing them at the very beginning of the race, when all the riders were still packed together, meant I lost many positions and then it was really hard to recover. It’s a pity, we’ve made a lot of progress in the last few races and I felt very competitive in dry conditions, but we still need to improve our capability to have the same performance also in the wet.”
