Following an exciting opening day, the Losail International Circuit greeted riders and teams today with dusty weather and more wind than on Friday. Yet, the amazing floodlights of the impressive venue in Qatar delivered once again a unique atmosphere for the late sessions.

Darryn Binder, who jumps fresh from Moto3 to the MotoGP bike, was further improving his lap around lunch time today. In FP3, he managed to go 0.532 seconds quicker than on Friday to close the gap to the front further, reaching less than two seconds to the fastest rider.

The South African was unlucky with his engine shutting off in Free Practice four. Therefore, he aimed for even more in Qualifying, but unfortunately crashed out, which ended his session prematurely. He will start his first ever premier class round in row eight.

The long-awaited first race day of the 2022 MotoGP World Championship season starts tomorrow with Warm Up at 13:40 local time (11:40 CET). While the red lights will go off at 18:00 local time (16:00 CET), opening a 22 laps long exciting fight for the very first championship points of the year.

DARRYN BINDER

“Today started off quite well. I felt, I made a good step forward in FP3. I managed to improve my time from last night, so I was really happy with that. In FP4 unfortunately, my bike stopped on the first lap, which wasn’t the greatest thing, because it disturbed our plan for the Qualifying. My first time in Qualifying was a bit crazy. You get two laps, coming in, changing the tyres and then another two and I didn’t have the best first two laps. Then unfortunately, when I changed the tyre for the second run, I was probably looking for a bit too much going into turn two and maybe I didn’t have the tyre up to temperature and I crashed. I’m disappointed how the Quali went, but I felt the step we made in FP3 was good and I think we can just pick up from there tomorrow, make the race and see what happens.”