Feeling ‘more and more at home’ in factory Ducati colours, a confident Jack Miller was rewarded with an unofficial all-time MotoGP lap record around the Losail International Circuit on the first day of Qatar test II.
Quick from the outset, Miller had already spent a majority of the day at the top of the times - thanks to his early effort as the first of Wednesday’s six riders to break the 1’54 barrier. The Lenovo rider was briefly ousted from the number one spot while working on long-run-pace in the closing minutes of the seven-hour-session as Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo broke Marc Marquez’s 2019 lap record with an impressive 1’53.263. Seeing the new target, he regrouped, with the help of a fresh set of tyres, to best his rival by 0.08s on his final lap of the day.
Having just set the fastest-ever-lap around the Losail International Circuit - a 1’53.183 - Miller declared: “It felt mega. When you can put together a lap like that it’s always a nice feeling but I mean we have perfect conditions today.
“We’ve had no real wind since the last test, plenty of rubber on the ground and to be honest the humidity never came up really that high tonight, so it was a perfect storm.
"I mean it had to be done today I think. Fabio did it already. I’d done that 53.8 and I thought, ‘Ah that’s alright!’ and then I came back in after I did a little bit of a long run and I saw Fabio had done a 53.2 and I was like ‘Oooh, that’s going alright!’ but no, we threw another tyre on it and I’m pretty happy with that!
“We got through our things that we needed to get through today and I think we made some improvements with the bike too.”
Starting to find his confidence with the factory machine on longer runs, the Australian also explained: “The tyres are working differently day-by-day here, especially without the wind. They were better in some ways and worse in others but we were able to understand, I put a race distance on the tyre and it was really good.
“It kind of fell off maybe the last, I wasn’t really happy enough with the pace on probably the last three laps. It’s not too much of an issue considering we’re doing a really hot lap at the beginning and then also putting them through a little bit of a cycle let’s say, so that’s kind of understandable. In all, a really positive day for us and I’m just getting more and more at home in the red squad.
“I’m just trying to do what we can do. Today was our day but it’s all just testing you know, so we’ll just keep plugging away at it, get through the things that we need to get through and just try and focus on the two races coming up here.”
