John looking forward to raceday fight after difficult Portimao qualifying

Qualifying at Algarve International Circuit turned out to be a mixed affair for PETRONAS Sprinta Racing, with John McPhee starting from 19th after missing out on Q2 by just 0.010secs.

John was one of the first riders in FP3 to improve upon their time set yesterday, which put him in the top-three. Unfortunately, with riders bunched in the final minutes, John missed out on a direct Q2 place by just 0.039secs, finishing 16th with a 1min 48.310secs lap. After putting in a series of strong laps in Q1, the Scot looked set to make it through to Q2 but agonisingly missed out by just 0.010secs, after posting a 1min 48.488secs lap, so will start the final race of the year from 19th.

Tomorrow’s Warm Up session for John and KIP will begin at 9am local time, before the final 21-lap Moto3 race of 2020 gets underway at 11am local time.

John McPhee
19th (1’48.488)

I’m not happy with our result today because I feel like I haven’t been able to show our true potential. I did my flying lap completely alone and the lap time was good, if you look at Q2 it would have been enough for the front two rows. In Q1 there was a big group of riders all using the slipstream, which was the reason why we missed out on going through to Q2. Tomorrow is the last race, we are sure to enjoy it a lot and we’ll be fighting from the start to hopefully be near the front for the final laps. With the long straight after the last corner I think we can expect to have one big group in the race, however it’s hard to know because we’ve never had a race here. We’ll see tomorrow and I’ll try my best to make my way forward.