The pre-season tests have come to a close in Qatar for PETRONAS Sprinta Racing’s Moto3 riders John McPhee and teammate Khairul Idham Pawi, who have enjoyed three successful days at Losail International Circuit. Combined with the results from the previous two tests in Jerez, the squad is in a good place ahead of the first race of the year – where they will be hoping for strong results.

John ends the final day of testing, after being consistently quick aboard his Honda NSF250RW, ready for the challenge that racing will bring with improvements made to his machine. Able to enjoy warm, sunny conditions across the entire test, the Scot focused the majority of his work into the final session of the day when conditions were similar to what will be faced in the upcoming race.

John enjoyed 38 laps today and set a fastest time of 2mins 5.636secs, placing him fifth in the day’s standings and eighth across the entire test.

The PETRONAS Sprinta Racing Moto3 team now looks firmly ahead to the first race of the year, which will take place at Losail International Circuit, Qatar, next weekend (6-8 March).

John McPhee, 5th (2:05.636)

“Overall the Qatar test has been really productive. We continued to work from where we left off in Jerez and we were able to back up the feeling that we had there, plus be fast all three days. The main focus of this weekend was to prepare for the race weekend next week, so we worked a lot on doing many laps with the used tyres. When it came to doing the time-attack style fast laps I went alone both times so I’m really satisfied to have achieved the lap-time we did, but more importantly we were able to maintain this pace across 18 laps. We didn’t test so many things but we made a couple of updates to the front end of the bike, which was productive and made a small improvement.”

Johan Stigefelt, Team Director

“For the Qatar test with John we haven’t been able to make a great deal of laps to be honest but we’ve been working through a few things that we wanted to try with the settings. In general he’s very happy with the bike, even coming from Jerez, so we didn’t have big changes but a few things that we have on our minds to try. The long runs have been good, he’s consistent, but we didn’t get to do a proper time-attack. The ones he did do, he was alone and so didn’t have a draft, which actually makes his time very impressive! It shows that he’s happy and confident with the bike. We’re going into the first race of the season in good shape with him.”