Enea Bastianini has followed up his maiden Moto3 pole position in Catalunya by topping the qualifying timesheets again at Assen. The Italian will lead Jorge Navarro and Karel Hanika on the front row tomorrow with all three going in search of their first Grand Prix victory.
The three practice sessions had all been led by Danny Kent ahead of Romano Fenati and the championship leader laid down an early marker in qualifying, clocking a 1:41.853 twelve minutes in. Unlike in the earlier sessions though, the Briton didn’t enjoy any level of dominance and approaching the halfway mark, Hanika edged ahead by two tenths.
Fenati was languishing outside the top ten and began to make inroads in the final twenty minutes, climbing to fourth, but it wasn’t until four minutes from time that Hanika’s benchmark was finally toppled. In similar circumstances to Catalunya, Bastianini unleashed a blistering turn of pace on his final run, pulling out four tenths of a second on the competition and in one fell swoop, pole position was secured.
Hanika held onto second until the very last lap of the afternoon when he usurped by Navarro while Danny Kent’s last ditch improvement wasn’t good enough to lift him higher than fourth. Isaac Vinales climbed to fifth ahead of Miguel Oliveira and Fabio Quartararo while Fenati fell all the way back to eighth, one place ahead of the second Leopard Honda of Efren Vazquez.
Francesco Bagnaia rounds out the top ten despite a late crash on his Mapfre Mahindra but a tumble at the beginning of the session proved costly for compatriot Niccolo Antonelli who couldn’t do any better than nineteenth.
MOTO3 MOTUL TT ASSEN: QUALIFYING RESULT
[table id=405 /]
