MotoGP Argentina: Oliveira targeting qualifying, ‘we can be competitive’

Miguel Oliveira’s stunning wet race win in Indonesia promoted Red Bull KTM to the top of the MotoGP Constructers Championship.

While the Austrian team’s progress may have been stunted somewhat by the logistic issues currently disrupting set up for the Argentina Grand Prix this weekend, Oliveira remains positive about the prospect ahead.

“I think we need to be happy considering some teams have nothing and my side is only missing one bike, so I would say it’s the least of the problems,” the Portuguese rider admitted on Thursday ahead of a shortened two-day weekend. “We have to condense all the activity for Saturday which will be different and a challenge especially for mechanics, so let’s see how that how that goes but happy of course to do something!

“Mandalika marked an important step in our results,” Oliveira reflected on his dominant round two victory. “It’s a long time that I didn’t score that amount of points, especially after the second half of the season last year. It was challenging conditions. We were fast in both conditions, on the dry and the wet we were competitive. I felt like also in the dry maybe we could challenge for the podium positions.

“It’s a big question mark now, but of course we want to take that drive, that motivation that the win gave us to start to work here and be competitive also on this track.

“The weekend can go very well” he continued. “The bike in 2019 was not the best version, or not even close of the bike that we have now and we were midfield competitive, which was good at that time. So for now I think we can also aim to challenge for higher positions here. There is no reason not to think why we could not be competitive.”

With a crash in the opening race at Qatar one month ago followed