Maverick Viñales took on his Monster Yamaha teammate and won in qualifying this afternoon, bettering Fabio Quartararo with the fastest ever lap of the Assen track to claim pole for the Dutch GP.
The Spaniard has topped every session of the TT weekend bar FP4 - which went to Quartararo by a margin of a two-tenths. Breaking the Frenchman’s 2019 all-time circuit record with a 1’31.814 as he looked to banish the demons from Germany last time out, despite sticking to exactly the same bike set up. The difference? The high grip levels of the recently resurfaced 4.5km layout.
“Thank God, has been good from FP1. I have good grip, I can be fast,” Viñales explained from Parc Fermé on Saturday afternoon.
“Because this is the problem - that when we don’t have grip, we are not able to improve. We are trying, we are trying many things, and it was good today. Honestly this weekend I didn’t even touch nothing, I said ‘don’t touch the bike, it is perfect’. I’m quite happy.
“Honestly, this should be the normal all the weekends. I think we have a good level, our confidence is high. I have a really high confidence on what we are able to do. It’s just that we haven’t found a way to do it.
“Now we will see. Tomorrow we have a good chance, we will push at the maximum. I know I’m strong in a few corners where it’s nice also to overtake, so we’ll see. For me, the result is not important, the important thing is to give the maximum from lap one to lap 26.
“Honestly, I don’t even touch the bike, as I said. Not even one click. It’s just that there is grip on the track, I have grip on the tyres, and I’m able to be fast. With these kinds of bikes when you don’t have grip, you can do nothing. We are trying and it’s good that we are fast because they can compare and we can see why, in Sachsenring, I could not be fast and here I can do whatever I want with the bike. We need to check and see what we are doing differently, but at the end, what I can say, as a rider, is I just have more grip and I can push more the bike.
“These MotoGP bikes have to create grip, and if you don’t have grip, you have to have a bike that turns. Our bike, at least for me, when I have grip I can turn, without grip, is difficult. Basically, nobody knows the answer to that problem, and it causes me many bad results in many races. I just wait for the opportunity to have these kind of conditions - at the end the speed we never lose, and this is the most important thing.
“I know this bike is great when you have grip, without grip, sometimes it’s the worst. But as I said, for me, the Yamaha bike, when you are on point, when you have good feeling, is a fantastic bike. You can do whatever you want with the bike on the track. The problem is that it’s happened four times this year. This is the biggest problem. For sure, I’m positive to change the result from Sachsenring, and if we take good data here, maybe we can improve in the next ones.
“It’s enough to have five, six races in a row with really bad results. Normally, in the past, even if I have not good grip condition, I was able to make one lap and be in the front, but these last races, not even for the one lap. I crash once per race [weekend], when maybe I never crashed in all the season, so for me it’s an indicator that we are far away from where we need to be.”
As ever with Assen, the talk always turns to the weather, with the threat of rain for Sunday afternoon potentially on the horizon. Viñales, however, seems unconcerned.
“I felt good in FP2 with the rain,” he said.
“Straight away we were fast and only Oliveira was ahead of us. If it’s rain, I prefer that it’s heavy rain and not ‘dry’ rain. I think our bike works really well when there is a lot of water on the track,” he concluded.
