Miguel Oliveira consistently found himself at the lower positions in the practice sessions and qualifying for the MotoGP Australian GP, delivering a performance that was worse than expected at Phillip Island. However, in the race, he put in a solid performance without errors, ultimately finishing in 12th place.
Despite the challenges, the Portuguese rider from the CryptoDATA RNF MotoGP Team considered his goal achieved, given the conditions: ‘The story today? I guess you’ve heard already a few things about the grip and the tyre wear and it isn’t different for me. I managed to find a better pace today and I finished on the points – which was the target anyway. I don’t know if we could achieve much better giving the difficult of the weekend. Three points’.
This was a round where better performance was expected from Aprilia, but Oliveira couldn’t provide an explanation for falling short of the anticipated performance: ‘It’s true that looking at the track and the characteristics of the track we expected a bit better. But for some reason we couldn’t achieve the performance we were looking for’.