Lowes looks ready to win
Sizzling pace puts Brit in the hunt at final test
John McPhee finished the final pre-season Moto3 test of 2019 happy with sixth overall, leaving the Losail circuit pleased with both his lap times and having worked through a long testing programme. The Scot didn’t put a foot wrong during the three-day outing as he and his Petronas Sprinta Honda team chipped away at times and he’s now adamant they’re going into the opening round in a strong position. “We had a good three days,” he told MCN. “All pre-season I’ve focused on myself and just got on with exploring all the different things we wanted to test. I think we’ve done a good job of that, doing things like testing the headstock and learning both the positives and negatives of going away from our base setting. It’s nice to be able to do that and still jump back to the base setting and go fast.”
McPhee’s also also confident that the combination of his speed and the new qualifying format means he can now improve his qualifying performances; the Achilles’ Heel of his race weekends last season. He explained: “I tried to go in the group to set my lap time in the final session but it didn’t work, so I attacked on my own and was still able to do a decent lap time. That’s even nicer, because it shows that come Sunday we’ve got the pace to be in the mix. The biggest thing that I wanted to understand was if I could be inside the top 10 in every session regardless of tyre or if I was alone. As long as I can get into Q2 directly and can bang in a decent lap time on my own then I’ll be fine.
McPhee happy with sixth