{"id":237673,"date":"2025-10-24T13:46:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T13:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/237673\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T13:46:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T13:46:07","slug":"pol-espargaro-was-begging-for-more-rain-then-went-faster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/237673\/","title":{"rendered":"Pol Espargaro \u201cwas begging for more rain\u201d &#8211; then went faster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/motogp\/racer\/1832\/pol-espargaro\" data-entity-type=\"external\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Pol Espargaro<\/a> continued his stellar form as a Tech3 KTM stand-in with eighth on the timesheets during Friday practice for the Malaysian <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/motogp\" data-entity-type=\"external\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">MotoGP<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>That put the Spaniard directly through to Qualifying 2, once again, as the second-best RC16 rider behind only session leader Pedro Acosta.<\/p>\n<p>Espargaro set a 1m 58.5s on his first time attack and admitted he was \u201cbegging for more rain\u201d as he was pushed down the order.<\/p>\n<p>But he needn\u2019t have worried. The Spaniard slashed half-a-second from his best time during his final run to briefly hold third place.<\/p>\n<p>That became eighth at the chequered flag, securing an all-important top ten place with a lap time half-a-second from Acosta but the same margin clear of next best KTM rider Brad Binder (17th).<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I\u2019m very pleased with the work done today,\u201d smiled Espargaro. \u201c[Just like in] Australia, everything comes together when I push, so it is a great feeling.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter the first lap time, it started to rain, and I was begging for more rain, because my lap time was already fast, and I did not know if I could go faster!<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThen, we all went for it again, and I could improve by half a second, which is so fast, but still 0.5 seconds slower than Pedro, but it is amazing for us anyway.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe weekend is starting well, with two KTMs inside the top 10, so let\u2019s try to keep the work going, and hopefully we can qualify well for both sprint and race.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Tech3 team-mate Enea Bastianini experienced a very different day, finishing just 19th fastest, 1.394s from Acosta.<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are once again in a similar scenario to all the other weekends,\u201d said Bastianini, a Sepang MotoGP winner in 2023 \u201cFriday feels like we are riding this bike for the first time, then we get better on Saturday, but it is too late for Sunday.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe confidence on the bike here is too low, we did not get any positive feeling today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt feels very strange to be two seconds slower than a few years ago, on a track that I have always been fast on, and I don\u2019t know what we can do to fix that, without the confidence.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are far from our potential right now, so we have a lot of work to do to get back a good feeling.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pol Espargaro continued his stellar form as a Tech3 KTM stand-in with eighth on the timesheets during Friday&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,101326,6399,806,805,803,804,6398,26895,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-237673","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-enea-bastianini","11":"tag-ktm","12":"tag-motor","13":"tag-motor-sports","14":"tag-motosport","15":"tag-motosports","16":"tag-pol-espargaro","17":"tag-red-bull-ktm-tech3","18":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}