MotoGP Misano Qualifying: Francesco Bagnaia takes pole position with lap record

September 18, 2021 EMR Writer

Francesco Bagnaia once again does what he does best taking pole position.

It’s a skill, it’s a pure skill to be able to come from seemingly nowhere and smash a lap record to bits but ‘Pecco’ continues to do it, hard to forget last years 1:30 time which was cancelled due to track limits and then this years Portimao pole which ruined the record before being stolen thanks to a yellow flag. Francesco Bagnaia continues to stun us with another pole position following from last time out whereby he set a new lap record at Aragon, doubling up with another record here in Misano with a time of 1:31.065.

It was a very crash heavy session with Enea Bastianini, Valentino Rossi, Takaaki Nakagami, Aleix Espargaro, Marc Marquez and Fabio Quartararo all tasting tarmac trying to improve their time, well, most of them anyway with Enea Bastianini comically crashing on his in-lap after taking P1 in the Q1 session.

For Fabio it was a very rare crash, we aren’t used to crashes from the Frenchman who covered thousands of kilometres as a MotoGP rookie without a single crash, today was the day he decided “pole or nothing”, he was in third place behind a Ducati 1-2 and knew he had pace for pole but as he approached T1 braking a little later than normal his front end gave out and chucked him down to the floor, thankfully he wasn’t beaten by anyone and remained on the front row behind Francesco Bagnaia and MotoGP’s very own Toprak Razgatlioglu-esque rider Jack Miller who celebrated with his typical stoppies.

Leading row two were the Ducati’s of Jorge Martin and Johann Zarco meaning we saw a total of four Ducati’s in the top 5, some may say this is a Ducati track, no idea why… Pol Espargaro joined the Pramac boys on row two after a late charge from the Spaniard, a fantastic lap for the Honda Repsol rider who led his teammate Marc Marquez by 0.012 seconds, Marquez crashing out trying to chase down Francesco Bagnaia.

For the first time in a long while we have two Aprilia’s within the top 10 with Aleix Espargaro in P8 after a crash and Maverick Vinales in P10, an absolutely superb session for the Aprilia’s despite the crash.

Q2 Results –