Lorenzo: Three crashes “not normal for me”

Lorenzo fell twice in qualifying, following his heavy shunt in practice on Friday, but is confident that his team has solved setup problems that meant he languished off the pace.

“The three crashes have been quite a bit different from each other,” said Lorenzo. “But the reason was more or less the same: you have to be conscious that the front tyre, for the moment, doesn’t allow you to push so much, like before.

“But I’m happy we understood why we were so slow yesterday. I crashed many times, but I prefer to do that and be competitive than don’t crash and be 1.5s behind.

“Today, the first one was because I entered the kerb [on the inside of Turn 8] – I shouldn’t enter so much the kerb. I was used to enter the kerb with the Bridgestone but with the Michelin it’s not possible.

“In the second one, I didn’t enter the braking zone too deep but maybe I didn’t warm-up the right-side of the tyre on the previous lap. I was straight, not braking particularly strong, but I just lost the front.

“Three mistakes – from my part it’s not normal I make so many mistakes, but this weekend has happened like this. I’m disappointed about the crashes and the position, but finally I could see some big improvement with the bike.” 

Confident of race chances

Although he will start 11^th, Lorenzo says his works Yamaha team now understands his lack of pace in practice. His Q1 time would have put him fifth on the grid.

“In Q1 I was very competitive on new tyres,” he said. “We made another modification for Q2, but we didn’t have enough new tyres. I imagine I could do a 1m21.4s or 1m21.5s – with this laptime I could have been front row, or second row at worst.

“We made a mistake on the setting this weekend, we tried different kinds of setting and we finally came back to a standard setting and we improved so much. We lost the way a little bit with the settings, and with the cold conditions of yesterday it complicated all the things.

“It’s still not too late, if we have dry conditions I feel I can recover into a good position tomorrow.

“I need to stay on the bike, but I want to be fast. Let’s see how I feel if it rains. I won’t go there with a negative mentality.”