“I’m very sad. If they prick me now they don’t even draw blood. Apologize to the team, because it is a very big mistake. You can’t make a mistake like that fighting for the championship. It tastes very bad to me. Really”, he began saying Aleix Espargaro after his blunder at the end of the MotoGP race in Montmeló, the same one that ended a lap earlier than it should have and that cost him to fall from a creditable second place to a disappointing fifth place.
This is how he explained what happened on Dazn: “I saw the board, that mine was the first and I didn’t have time to look much further. I have only seen the difference with MartÃn and then I have looked at the tower to see the laps, and I have not remembered that here it is L1 and then L0. I saw the sign and there was actually one more lap left when I passed. I feel very bad for the team, because they had done a very good job. Only Fabio had been a little faster than us.”
Regarding the general calculation of the GP: “It has been a very nice weekend. I have had a lot of pressure, infinitely more than any GP, but I have enjoyed all the fans, the family, my children. It’s a shame because I wanted to win, but Fabio gained some distance at the start and I lost time with Jorge and I couldn’t catch him anymore. It has been a very difficult weekend for me to manage. Everything very new, but I was doing very well until the end, that I made the mistake”.
And about his reaction on the last lap: “I was able to limit damage, because there were only nine points, but right now I don’t care, because I wanted to get on the podium and I wanted to win and I couldn’t get it. Hopefully in the end these nine points don’t count for anything.”
At the lightning press conference he gave, he said this: “It was one hundred percent my fault. The board was very close to the curve and I didn’t have time to see all the information and I only had time to see the + 0.6 with Jorge MartÃn. I wanted to secure second place and since I didn’t see the remaining laps I looked at the tower and I didn’t remember that here the last lap is marked L0. I saw L1, I made a lap and I cut. I don’t know , I was so focused that I didn’t notice the checkered flag or anything and it’s a very big mistake”.
Your reaction: “I have seen a big screen where I have seen Massimo Rivola who was focused on him putting his hands on his head and I automatically understood that he thought he had broken the engine. I saw that everyone was shooting hard and I don’t know… I did the lap trying to recover. I imagined that I was 12th, so good, in terms of losing points it hasn’t been brutal, only nine points, but we had 20 guaranteed and a podium in Barcelona. It is one of the most difficult days.”
And when asked if this could be a turning point to turn it into motivation, he replied: “Absolutely not. This is a mistake. In Germany I am going to try to win but it cannot be a turning point. We had a perfect weekend, although in the race I didn’t have the speed of Fabio in the first few laps. It was 20 points and it is very difficult to get 20 points, it was the fifth consecutive podium and he already had it. So it is what it is.”