Fabio Quartararo admits that he is “not feeling great” after suffering from two heavy falls so far this weekend.

The current MotoGP championship leader was spat over the top of his PETRONAS YZR-M1 during the third free practice session, just 24 hours after a cold tyre crash at the downhill corkscrew.

However, Quartararo, despite being stretchered off the Aragon circuit, recovered quickly and put his number 20 machine on pole position, despite physically “not feeling great”.

“I was sore on the right from yesterday, and now on the left from today. I’m not feeling great, but on the bike, it is not too bad,” Quartararo began after his 1’47.076s lap time in qualifying.

“Normally the new tyres are good, but today we had a big drop in grip with the rear and that was really strange. The team will analyse this for sure and try to figure out why.

“I’m really happy though as all through FP4 I was feeling okay, I was able to do a long run and I have the pole position,” said the Frenchman.

Attention then turned on to whether or not the 21-year-old could fight for the win, “Let’s hope for a great race tomorrow; we still need to work on the pace, but we’re not too far off what we want. I think starting later tomorrow is the correct thing to do because it is really cold in the morning, starting later is best for the safety of all riders. I think we can fight for the podium, but we need to see tomorrow what happens.

The MotoGP race will get underway an hour later than usual, with lights out at 15:00 GMT+2.

Featured image: PETRONAS SRT