Miguel Oliveira described his Emilia Romagna Grand Prix weekend as “a glass half-full” despite crashing out from podium contention in the closing laps of the Misano encounter.
The KTM rider had failed to finish higher than 11th in the six races since the Dutch TT back in June after struggling with a broken hand sustained in practice for the Styrian GP, though looked to be back to his sparkling mid-season form, in which he scored four successive top five results between the Italian and Dutch contests, in the second Misano round of the year.
He qualified a strong fifth on Saturday before running as high as third in the opening segment of Sunday’s 27-lap sprint, though eventually settled into fourth after finding himself unable to match the speed of leader Francesco Bagnaia as well as Honda pair Marc Marquez and Pol Espargaro.
Oliveira was in position to move into third after Ducati’s Bagnaia crashed out with six tours remaining, though unseen by TV pictures he went down just seconds after the Italian as he lost the front of his RC16 after pushing too hard into Turn 14.
The Portuguese rider-while frustrated-was optimistic following his return to form, leaving him to label his outing as “a glass half-full” and hopeful of a strong result for his second home race of the year at the Algarve International Circuit next weekend.
“I lost the front in Turn 14, I was struggling a bit to get the strokes with the empty fuel tank and I crashed over the little bumps at 14,” explained Oliveira.
“It’s a shame to have not translated a very good weekend into a good result but I was at least up there to grab it, we’ve had a lot of races recently where we’ve had to look at the races as a glass half-empty or half-full.
“This one was definitely half-full so we need to keep thinking positive and take this line of work into Portimao which will be a special race, so I’m very keen to make a good result there.
“I wished I could press pause and restart (after crash) there’s things in life you wish you could just rewind a fraction of a second, it’s hard to manage but it’s racing.
“We leave with the feeling we could have had a podium with all the crashes and everything, but the team is happy, we showed good progress so hopefully we can translate that into a good result (at Portimao.)”
