Miguel Oliveira concluded the Friday practice session of the MotoGP Indonesian GP with the seventh-fastest time, proceeding directly to the qualifying in Mandalika. The rider from the CryptoDATA RNF MotoGP Team knows that he still needs to make progress since he isn’t fully maximizing the potential of his Aprilia.
The Almada-born man was happy with his Friday, as he said: ‘Today was good. Finally the last run on the soft rear was good. There were a lot of yellow flags, so I was getting a little bit impatient to get my lap, but finally I could do a clean lap. Actually I didn’t knew if it was enough, because 1m30.4s was really fast and I did 1m31.19s and I was a bit far. But I’m happy to make it through. There is still some work to do for tomorrow morning pace-wise. Just looking forward in this af ternoon to get a couple of things better’.
Aprilia is showing a strong form at Mandalika, and Oliveira considers the layout is well suited to RS-GP… despite addmiting he is losing a lot of lap time: ‘I have no idea. It’s an interesting thing. I knew yesterday looking at the layout that we shouldn’t be worried because the layout suits to many of the aspects of our bike. Just in my case I need to understand how to take advantage of what the bike can do better. And at the moment it seems I’m not that comfortable on the bike. In sector two I lose a bunch of time. It’s the fast sector, I don’t have enough turning, enough stability, and I’m losing too much time there’.
Asked if he thinks he could be closer to the factory Aprilia riders, the Portuguese rider confirmed that this is his goal: ‘I think I can be closer to them than what I am now for sure. That’s my target’.