Italian driver Marco Bezzechi (Aprilia) won this Saturday, November 8, the pole position for the MotoGP Grand Prix of Portugal, the 21st of the 22 races of the season, while the Portuguese Miguel Oliveira (Yamaha) will start from 19th position.
The Almada-born driver failed to pass the first stage of qualifying (Q1), finishing 1.208 seconds behind the fastest in that stage, Frenchman Fábio Quartararo (Yamaha), who secured passage to Q2 together with Australian Jack Miller (Yamaha).
Oliveira finished just 0.195 seconds behind the Italian Niccolò Bulega (Ducati), a regular Superbike rider who was called upon to replace the Spaniard Marc Márquez (Ducati), absent due to injury.
In Q2, the fastest turned out to be Marco Bezzechi, with a time of 1.37.556 minutes, beating the Spaniard Pedro Acosta (KTM) by 0.150 seconds, with Fábio Quartararo (Yamaha) coming in third, at 0.304.
Next are the Italian Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati), who starts from fourth place on the grid, and the Spaniard Alex Márquez (Ducati), in fifth. The youngest of the Márquez brothers suffered a crash two minutes from the end of the session and was no longer able to fight for pole.
In this way, Bezzechi became the seventh different driver to secure first place on the starting grid of the Portuguese GP, held in Portimão.
With these results, Marc Márquez won the BMW award for the best driver in qualifying this season.
The record for the Algarve circuit also continues to be held by Marc Márquez, with a time of 1.37.226 minutes, which earned him pole position in 2023.
“The race sprint It was a little better than qualifying”
Miguel Oliveira said that “finishing within the points” is the objective for this Sunday’s race, although he recognizes the “difficult task” given the bike’s lack of rear grip.
“The race sprint It was a little better than qualifying, but the difficulty is still there in terms of poor grip on the rear of the bike”, he said at the end of the race.
For the driver born in Almada, the classification in sprint “opens good prospects” for the main race, despite “it has been known since Friday that the problem [de aderência] of the motorcycle would be very difficult to resolve”.
“Now we have to continue with a positive outlook for Sunday and I realistically believe that a good result would be to arrive within the points [nove primeiros] and, therefore, we will do everything to achieve the objective”, he assured.
According to the Portuguese rider, setting up the bike for Sunday’s race “is not an exact science, but something can be done” to improve.
Miguel Oliveira confided that the weekend “has been emotional” with the support of the fans, having not been able to “stay apart from the emotions” of the thousands of supporters.
“It’s impossible not to get emotional or remain indifferent to all the affection that people show. Just by the simple fact that I’m on the grid, for them it’s already a reason to be with me”, he highlighted.
The Portuguese stated that the support of thousands of Portuguese “gives us the strength to do better, and with the help of the motorbike things are able to go well”.