Moto3 kicked off its weekend at the Qatar Airways Grand Prix of Austria under grey skies and a genuine chill in the air, and it was David Almansa who emerged with the fastest time on the board when the opening practice session wrapped up.
Riding for Liqui Moly Dynavolt Intact GP, Almansa clocked a best lap of 1:40.595, a benchmark nobody else in the field could get close to matching.
The chasing pack, however, was absurdly tight behind him. Maximo Quiles was the nearest challenger in second at 1:41.243, over six tenths back, but from third place downward the gaps shrank to almost nothing. Angel Fernandez slotted into third for Leopard Racing at 1:41.289, just 0.046 seconds off Quiles, with Adrian Carpe fourth for Red Bull KTM Ajo a mere eleven thousandths further back. Brian Uriarte rounded out the top five for the sister Red Bull KTM Ajo entry, within a tenth of Carpe’s time, underlining just how bunched the field was at the sharp end.
KTM machinery dominated the early running, filling the majority of the top ten, though Honda found representation through Fernandez, Veda Pratama and Guido Pini, the latter setting the fourth-fastest time of the session for Leopard Racing despite a wild final lap that saw his last recorded time balloon to over four minutes, likely the result of a red flag or a cautious cool-down lap late in the running. Roman Salmela and Jose Esteban rounded out the top seven and eight respectively, both on KTMs, before Pratama and Pini closed out the top nine, with Valentin Perrone completing the top ten for Red Bull KTM Tech3.
Further back, the frantic midfield battle that defines Moto3 was already on full display, with Matteo Bertelle, Joel Kelso, Alvaro Carreras Cruces and Ethan O’Shea separated by barely a few hundredths across eleventh to fourteenth. Conditions weren’t making life easy for anyone, with track temperatures sitting at a cool 14 degrees Celsius under cloudy skies, air temperature at just 11 degrees, and humidity sitting high at 84 percent, the kind of morning that keeps riders working hard just to generate tyre temperature let alone find outright pace.
With the softest of margins separating the top fifteen or so riders, this opening session offered little more than a snapshot, but Almansa’s clean, comfortable topping of the times gives him an early marker to build from as the Austrian weekend gets fully underway.