Miguel Oliveira<\/a> during the pre-race ceremony, with his daughter handing him a Portuguese flag on the main straight.<\/p>\nOliveira admits the emotional moment made it hard for him to get focused for the race, in which he finished 14th.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt meant a lot, for sure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt was so symbolic for my daughter to give me the flag, and I was questioning myself how the hell was I going to race, putting the helmet on and going flat out.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, more or less,\u00a0 I managed to do it. I finished strong in the race. I got a good pace in the end, finished close to the two Yamahas in front of me.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had the technical difficulties that we were anticipating before the race.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, yeah, we hope in Valencia we get a better weekend and we can be a little more competitive, and have a bit more fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u2018technical difficulties\u2019 Oliveira is referring to were a lack of traction on his Yamaha, which made the bike \u201cunstable\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2018m really happy with my race, especially considering where we started on Friday,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe managed to stay close to the other Yamahas, in what we knew would be a tough weekend.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2018t an easy race \u2014 it was hard to manage the rear spin, and when there was a bit more grip, the bike felt really unstable.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings got better towards the end, and I was able to push and do some fast laps. Honestly, it was the best I could do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pramac Yamaha MotoGP rider Miguel Oliveira admits he was \u201cquestioning how the hell I could race\u201d after an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,3557,806,805,803,804,7188,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-275452","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-miguel-oliveira","11":"tag-motor","12":"tag-motor-sports","13":"tag-motosport","14":"tag-motosports","15":"tag-prima-pramac-yamaha","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275452","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=275452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}