Following a rain-affected Saturday at the British GP that saw a red flagged FP4 and a significantly delayed qualifying, the time of tomorrow’s MotoGP race has been moved earlier to 11:30am in the hope of avoiding the worst of the rain. Before this announcement was made, Cal Crutchlow spoke to the media about the conditions of the track and how he would feel about racing on a very wet track tomorrow, as the forecast suggests.
In qualifying, the conditions were mixed. The track was wet in parts but also dry in parts, having dried out a lot from FP4 due to the delay in the schedule for safety reasons. FP4 saw 5 riders go off at Stowe corner due to surface water causing aquaplaning, with Tito Rabat suffering multiple fractures to his leg as a result.
“It was very very difficult because it was tricky at the end of the back straight as you saw, in the qualifying it was tricky because you were coming from dry track where the tyre was hot to then the tyre trying to cool down so it wasn’t very grippy.” explained Crutchlow.
“I think I did the best job I could with the package that we’ve got in these conditions, we overheat the tyre too much with the Honda and I feel that’s why we struggle more. If you see the other guys they did a longer run and got faster and faster where that’s impossible to do with the Honda.”
Crutchlow went on to say that he felt very good in the dry and felt he had a very good chance of winning the race tomorrow if the conditions were going to be dry, but the forecast tells a different story.
“It looks like it could be a disaster, because today was forecast under 1mm of rain and tomorrow is forecast over 16mm of rain, so either you don’t have a bank holiday Monday and we race here on Monday or we see you in Misano because you saw what happened as soon as there was surface water.”
The idea of holding the race on Monday has since been ruled out, but the race has been moved forward as far as possible to try and avoid cancellation. Forecasts differ, but some suggest it will start to rain at 9am and not stop until late in the evening. With such dangerous conditions seen today with only a short period of rainfall, doubt has certainly been cast on whether the race will go ahead tomorrow at all.
