Jorge Lorenzo says he was forced to jump from his Ducati during Sunday's MotoGP season-opener in Qatar, after suffering a failure of his front brake at Turn 4.
Trying to recover from a poor start from ninth – which he blames on an aggressive GP18 – Lorenzo noticed there was an issue at the start of the second lap, when braking for Turn 1 the brake lever on his bike came all the way back to the handlebar.
Managing the situation, Lorenzo was able to get back into a position to fight with Suzuki's Andrea Iannone for ninth, when the brake failed completely at Turn 4 on lap 13 – the Spaniard later admitting he was “lucky” it didn't happen on the run into the first corner.
“I didn't make a good start, because the 2018 bike wants to wheelie too much and I cannot keep the front on the ground like last year,” the Ducati man said on Sunday.
“So I lose several positions at the beginning of the race. Then, from the second lap, in the first braking, the hard braking, I was losing level, front level.
“I was trying to brake less, I thought I was overheating the front brake. And, then, when I was starting to feel better and better, and [producing] good lap times; I was the last two or three laps going faster than the riders who were leading the race.
“I was catching Iannone, I tried to pass Iannone. In Turn 4, in braking, I just lost completely the brake and I needed to jump from the bike to avoid hitting the wall.
“That's what happened, and I was really lucky it didn't happen in the first corner, because if it happened at 300km/h, it would be a different story.”
Pedrosa thwarted by faulty rear tyre
Lorenzo's compatriot Dani Pedrosa was a fixture in the vast lead group battling for the podium in the early stages of the 22-lap Losail encounter.
But the Repsol Honda man faded in the latter stages to seventh after he was hit by severe wheelspin, the result, he claims, of a faulty tyre from Michelin.
“I was doing quite well in the first corners, even though I had the front hard, so I had to take care in the beginning to work well the front,” Pedrosa said.
“Basically, the bike was good and we were all good, just the rear tyre had a lot of spinning for some reason.
“This was a little bit less performance tyre this time, didn't have the issue during the weekend, but unfortunately was in the race.
“I felt quite good and confident in the race to be fighting with the group and the podium, but in the end I could only manage to finish the race in seventh.
“It's a pity because to have this problem in a race where everybody is fast, you lose a lot of positions.”
