Gresini’s Enea Bastianini enjoyed a sublime Saturday in Qatar as the opening weekend of 2022’s MotoGP Championship unfolded.

Bastianini will line up for Sunday’s inaugural race between Pramac’s Jorge Martin and Repsol Honda’s Marc Marquez having stormed to second in the dying seconds of qualifying thanks to a 1’53.158 lap. A strong early performance had already seen the Ducati rider top FP3 outright.

“A fantastic day for me, for the team and for Fausto as well,” Bastianini admitted from the Doha paddock. “We worked a lot on the time attack during winter testing to arrive prepared for Qatar and now we’re on the front row. Obviously we’re always looking for more and the pole position wasn’t too far away, but today it is fine this way.”

The 24-year-old prepares for his maiden front row start ahead of the highly anticipated 22-lap battle at a track he finished on the edge of the top ten twice in his rookie season, and on two-year-old machinery.

“Last year with the ’19 bike was so difficult for me to do a good time attack but now with this bike is more easy, the power is more smooth and also with the soft tyre I can push very well,” he explained.

“Tomorrow it is going to be a challenging race. The pace is nice but also for Suzuki, for Jorge, for Marc; tomorrow will be a very hard race for me. It’s the first time on the front row because always I have to recover a lot of positions but I’m very happy for the job of the team and also for me.

“I don’t know if I have the potential but I try to win,” he admitted. “There are at least ten riders who can battle for the podium and the win. It will be important to understand track conditions. The choice of the tyre is so important. The medium and the soft are so close and we have to check better the data to understand which tyre is better. The first five laps will be key and the last five or six also crucial. For me will be a difficult race but I have to save the tyre, this is the most important.

“Sometimes it’s easy for me to save the tyre for the end of the race but tomorrow will be my first race with the 21 bike and I don’t know how is the race for me,” Bastianini continued. “The most important is to be concentrated and understand what’s happened, is only the first race and I have to understand how I manage this, starting from the first row but we wait tomorrow.

“Suzuki have a lot of corner speed and Ducati, we can break so much later,” he said of his potential against the rival manufacturers. “Tomorrow depends also from the condition of the track because we have seen this change a lot from the morning to the afternoon and also this can be critical but we will see tomorrow.”