‘One-and-done’ fears all but over for MotoGP’s blossoming rookie

Coming into the 2023 MotoGP season, it’s fair to say that there wasn’t an awful lot expected of the series’ sole rookie rider this year Augusto Fernandez.

But with strong performances in the opening third of the season culminating with an exceptional fourth-place finish at his Tech3 Gas Gas team’s home race at Le Mans last weekend, the reigning Moto2 champion has proven the doubters wrong right when he most needed to.

Fernandez has been showing increasingly strong form all season long, with the Spaniard one of only two riders (alongside Franco Morbidelli) who have scored points in every one of the five main Sunday races this season, a record that means he remarkably sits higher in the championship standings than the likes of Miguel Oliveira and factory Honda riders Marc Marquez and Joan Mir.

And the French Grand Prix seemed to bring another few steps forward even before the remarkable run to fourth on Sunday that saw him overtake 2022 title contender Aleix Espargaro on the final lap.

Struggling all season with his ability to extract the maximum from a new tyre and to set a fast time in qualifying mode, that changed on Saturday afternoon when Fernandez secured his first trip to Q2, setting himself up with a starting position on the front four rows of the grid for the first time.

And even though he might not have capitalised on it on Saturday afternoon by subsequently crashing out of the sprint, even in that fall there was an opportunity to learn – with the rookie admitting afterwards that the DNF highlighted something important.

Not trusting his gut feeling on Saturday to run with Michelin’s soft compound front tyre but instead trusting the advice of his team to go one step harder was what he put the Saturday crash down to – and he ensured he didn’t make the same mistake on Sunday.

“I’m starting to have feelings now with this bike,” he explained afterwards. “Until now, my feeling is so-so. I don’t know. I can be fast, or maybe not. I didn’t have my own feelings and thoughts about everything, and this weekend is the first one that I’ve started to feel the bike, to know how I can be fast.

“[On Saturday] I was afraid to follow my feelings, and [on Sunday] I said ‘OK, after two crashes I’ll go with the soft that I feel good with’, and it paid off. This, for the future, is good for us, to follow my instincts.”

And, with a bike under him that he’s starting now to understand, it means that he was in a position at the end of the race to utilise the racecraft that he’s been slowly but steadily building up since the opening round, placing his trust in the feelings he’s getting from the Gas Gas-badged KTM RC16 to hold off Espargaro for fourth.

“The front tyre dropped, and I think Aleix was with the hard, which is he was coming fast. But as I said, I knew I was struggling but I knew it – not like yesterday when I didn’t know. When it wasn’t good, wasn’t bad, but then I just…