Ajo Academy wildcard will take off from 21st position on the grid at the Aragon Grand Prix.

Tetsuta Nagashima will start tomorrow’s Aragon GP from the seventh row of the starting grid, in his first wildcard appearance of the season in the Moto2 World Championship. The Japanese rider from the Ajo Academy concluded the qualifying session on Saturday with his personal best lap of the weekend, and will fight to get into the points tomorrow.

Nagashima started the day by taking another small step forward in the final free practice, learning more about his bike and adapting to the level of the Moto2 World Championship. He rode at a similar pace to in the first two sessions, but set a better time than his top lap from Friday. With his 1:55.301 time, Nagashima made progress that allowed him to be positive about qualifying.

The big improvement came in the grid-defining session. Nagashima started strong and on his second lap had already improved by half a second from the morning. The Japanese rider struggled to further improve his time in the hot conditions of the Aragonese circuit. On his penultimate lap of qualifying, he managed to set his best lap of the weekend: 1:54.830 -21st position.

Tetsuta Nagashima will start from the seventh row of the grid for tomorrow’s Moto2 race, which takes place at 12:20pm local time.

Results – Qualifying Session
1. Sam Lowes (Kalex) 1:53.207
2. Alex Marquez (Kalex) 1:53.261 +0.054
3. Takaaki Nakagami (Kalex) 1:53.491 +0.284
4. Jonas Folger (Kalex) 1:53.501 +0.294
5. Johann Zarco (Ajo Motorsport) 1:53.659 +0.452
21. Tetsuta Nagashima (Ajo Academy) 1:54.830 +1.623

45 TETSUTA NAGASHIMA

“I’m not very happy after the result in the qualifying session. I think I can still improve my riding style and better adapt to this bike. Qualifying in 21st position is not a good result for me because, although we have improved a lot from yesterday, I think I could have improved my time a lot more. I tried to do my best but I made unusual mistakes, and I could not set any perfect lap. I think tomorrow I can have a good race, because we have been working all weekend thinking about the race and hopefully this will help us. The goal is to get into the points.”