Hakim Danish’s Austrian Grand Prix weekend took a step forward and a step back on Saturday. A faultless, rain-soaked Free Practice 2 was strong enough to send the AEON Credit – MT Helmets – MSI rider straight into Qualifying 2 without needing to survive Q1 — but once there, on a drying, record-breaking track, he could only manage 15th on the grid.
FP2 was run in genuinely difficult conditions — and Danish was the standout for consistency. All twelve of his timed laps counted, with not a single cancelled sector across the session, and his times fell steadily from an opening 1’54.730 down to a session-best 1’48.584 on his final lap. That was good enough for fourth on the combined timesheet, just 0.286 seconds off the rostrum places, and it carried enough weight from Friday’s practice pace that Danish’s name never appeared on Saturday’s Qualifying 1 entry list at all — he had already done enough to graduate straight to the business end of qualifying.
The track transformed to fully dry for the afternoon, and the whole field found significant time as a result. Danish’s session, though, was compromised by logistics rather than pace. His first run yielded only a single representative lap (1’43.253) before he pitted in early.
His second run began with a cancelled out-lap, leaving him just two genuine flying laps to work with: a 1’41.465, followed by his best of the session, 1’40.984, set right at the end. As has become a pattern for him this weekend, his fastest lap of the session came on his very last timed lap — but with so little track time available, there was no chance to build on it further.
The result was 15th on the 18-rider Q2 timesheet, 1.440 seconds off pole and just 0.183 seconds behind Adrian Fernandez in 14th. It’s worth noting how brutally tight that gap was in context: the entire Q2 field was covered by less than 1.7 seconds, and Danish’s teammate Ryusei Yamanaka only managed 17th, 0.191 seconds and two places further back.
The headline pace at the top of the session was extraordinary. Brian Uriarte’s pole-winning 1’39.544 didn’t just top the timesheet — it broke the Red Bull Ring’s all-time Moto3 lap record, eclipsing Maximo Quiles’ 2025 mark of 1’39.639. With David Almansa just 0.064 seconds behind in second, the front of the field was operating at a level Danish’s own strong FP2 pace couldn’t quite match once the track dried out and the fast laps started coming from everyone.
Danish will start Sunday’s race from 15th, a position built more on a truncated, logistics-hampered qualifying session than a true reflection of the pace he showed in Saturday morning’s rain. The task now is to convert that wet-weather sharpness into race-day results from further back on the grid than his Friday and early-Saturday form suggested he’d need to.
Credit Photo : ZK Racing
