CHALLENGING DAY FOR TAKA AT PORTIMAO

Takaaki Nakagami endured a tough day of qualifying ahead of the Algarve Grand Prix with an untimely fall undermining his chances in Saturday’s Q1 session at Portimao. Having narrowly failed to secure automatic progress to Q2, the LCR Honda IDEMITSU rider will now start Sunday’s race from 22^nd position on the grid.

Sitting 9^th overnight, Taka was hugely unfortunate to miss out on a top-10 spot in FP3 as he was just five thousandths of a second behind Jorge Martin to end up in 11^th. After posting 12^th in the final free practice session, the Japanese star then slid out at turn five minutes from the end of Q1, leaving him no time to return to the track.