JapaneseGP: Hakim Danish Falls Short of Q2 to Start 8th Row
A promising Saturday morning for Hakim Danish ended in gravel, and his afternoon qualifying effort — strong as it was — still wasn't quite enough to reach the business end of Saturday.
The AEON Credit - MT Helmets - MSI rider will start Sunday's race from 22nd on the grid after a crash cut short his Free Practice 2 and an eighth-place finish in Qualifying 1 left him outside the automatic promotion spots.
Danish was building toward a solid session. After an early 1'57.400 and 1'56.737, he found real pace from his fifth lap — a 1'55.594 that stood as his best of the session — before continuing to log consistent 1'55-to-1'56 laps through lap 10. It was on his next lap out, though, that the session ended for him: a dramatically inflated sector time and a slow crawl back to the pits point to a crash that brought his running to a premature close. He finished 11th on the combined sheet, 0.849 seconds off David Almansa's session-topping 1'54.745 — a lap that also stood as a new outright Motegi lap record, beating Jose Antonio Rueda's 2024 mark of 1'55.305.
Qualifying 1 brought a cleaner session and a genuinely sharp lap. Danish's best — a 1'55.856, set on the third lap of his first run — left him eighth in the twelve-rider group, just 0.534 seconds off Guido Pini's pole-setting 1'55.322 and a mere 0.066 seconds outside seventh. But only the top four from Q1 advance into Qualifying 2, and Pini, Rico Salmela, Jesus Rios, and Zen Mitani filled those spots ahead of him. A second run yielded a cancelled lap and no improvement, and Danish's Saturday qualifying effort ended there.
Finishing eighth in Q1 — fourth among those who didn't make the cut to Q2 — places Danish 22nd on Sunday's starting grid, well back of where his lap times across the weekend might otherwise have suggested. It caps a difficult Saturday that still had real positives buried in it: genuine pace in both sessions, undone first by a crash and then by the numbers game of a qualifying format that only rewards the very fastest with a route forward.
Credit Photo : ZK Racing
