Joan Mir had another frustrating Friday in Qatar after a late call for tyres left him no time to improve in FP2, leaving him out of MotoGP Q2 contention for the second week in a row.

Closing the afternoon’s first practice eighth in the times Mir looked to be making decent progress before the pressure mounted as the sun set ahead of FP2.

Pushing to come up the order as passage into Saturday’s Q2 was hotly contested, Mir was sitting fourth in the opening stages but as the clock ticked down his ill-timed returned to the garage for a fresh set of tyres left him out of time and closing the day in 13th place - one-tenth away from the top-10 and 0.867s from Jack Miller’s fastest time.

“My feeling is good but we completely missed the strategy in FP2,” a disgruntled Mir explained late this evening. “I only had one lap, I was not even able to make the second one, we ran out of time. We missed the strategy and we cannot miss, we don’t have the package to be easily in Q2 and if we miss something, we are out.

“We lost some time in the first run of the session and then we made some adjustments to the settings, but when it was time to get out for the time attack I could only do one good attempt, which prevented me from getting the tyres and brakes to the optimal temperature: That would have made that tenth of a second difference that kept me out of the top-10. I’m sure that in the second lap I could improve my lap time but I ran out of time.

“Honestly, if we didn’t find a bigger solution to improve the fast lap now we will not improve it tomorrow. This is clear. Of course we have the margin to improve because I couldn’t make the one lap at the end, one good lap with the good tyre.

“We didn’t make the correct strategy today and I’m not happy, because it’s really difficult to make a good lap time with the package that we have at the moment, and every detail here counts a lot,” the Spaniard continued.

”I don’t know what I will be able to do tomorrow with this package, it will be hard to go through to Q2 but if not, we will have to take risks in the first lap in the race.

“I must struggle more than ever to make a lap time. The harder that I try, the worse it is. Everyone is improving a lot the bikes, we have to improve our bikes, so I’m not happy about today.

“I am confident that we have good performance in FP1, it’s during the day and is difficult to say as we only rolled with used tyres but the lap times were not so bad so we didn’t lose any performance for the race pace, but we couldn’t make the lap time and thats why I’m not happy.”