Difficult ‘24 season opener in Qatar 🤕

Hi everyone,

Well, no doubt this was a disappointing one here in Qatar, and not the ideal way to begin the 2024 season.

The optimism was high entering the round, and it still is, to be honest, this championship is very close and tight between all of us, although on my side we just didn’t execute as I know that we can.

Our qualifying times were decent, made it through into Q2 which was nice, although we still had some work to do as a team heading into the Sprint Race to achieve the feeling that we were looking for.

Got off to a good launch in the Sprint Race, our starts were pretty strong across the weekend and we were able to put together what I thought was a pretty consistent outing with 10th place, though again, we’d like to be higher up the order than that.

We got off to another good start in the Feature Race and were there in the mix, and then I saw an opportunity at turn one as the boys in front of me ran it in pretty deep. I tried to hold the line to maybe sneak up the inside of them but the front went away.

The fall was just part of the story. I picked the bike up as it was pretty straight, but we were missing something. For whatever reason I wasn't able to run remotely close to the pace that we needed, so it was a little bit of a head scratcher.

The good news is that we can see what the bike is capable of, we had some competitive sessions across the race weekend and there are definitely positives that we can take, our big focus now is to analyse the data and come back strong in Portugal.

Unfortunately, these are the cards we were dealt with this weekend, but we won’t give up and will be ready and prepared for the next round.

Cheers,

Jack.