The comeback to Argentina following two years of absence was a tricky one for riders and teams, as logistical issues stopped the MotoGP World Championship from kicking off on Friday as usual. Therefore, Saturday was fully packed and the WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team riders did two 60-minutes Free Practice session and headed straight to Qualifying from there.

The steep learning curve of premier class rookie Darryn Binder continues; the South African started cautiously and improved by just 0.215 seconds from FP1 to FP2 due to a small crash towards the end of the second session. Yet, he managed to find a better feeling in Qualifying and increased his pace by 0.698 seconds in the afternoon, which will see him lining up in row eight for his third MotoGP race.

DARRYN BINDER

“It’s been a strange day and obviously, it’s very difficult to do time attacks straight away when you’ve been barely going on a MotoGP bike around this track. So, it was an interesting day and I was very happy with how it went in the end. In FP2, I made a mistake and crashed in the final minutes, which was unfortunate, but luckily, I was able to get back and we had enough time to be ready for Qualifying. I was really happy with my step in Q1, I managed to go quite a bit quicker, but so did everyone else. Anyway, if I look at the gap from the front, I feel I’m not too far from the other guys. Obviously, today was tricky for everybody, but overall, I’m quite pleased with how things went. We’ve just got to make the best of what we got. I’m really looking forward to the race tomorrow and also the Warm Up, where we have time enough to get some things dialled in that we found today.”