Lorenzo rails against 'very rude' Miller
UPDATE: Jack Miller, whose Saturday media session was cancelled due to his huge fall, told BT Sport on Sunday: "There was no spat. I just told him what I thought and you know, 20 versus 3, we're gonna go with the majority vote. As Carmelo had said three times in a row.
"I just got sick of going round and round in circles. I think everyone at the table had... and I was the one who said it.
"But I told told Cristian [Gabarrini], my old crew chief who is working with him now, 'hey, please just tell him that I didn't mean anything by it. No disrespect. It's just an Australian way of coming across' - at least I blame it on that!"
Jorge Lorenzo has railed against a 'very rude' Jack Miller after the pair shared a heated exchange during Friday's MotoGP Safety Commission meeting when discussing the decision to reintroduce Michelin's stiffer front tyre construction.
Miller apparently told Lorenzo, 'Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has one,' after the Majorcan had voiced his displeasure at the riders' decision not to offer the current tyre alongside the stiffer version.
The words clearly annoyed Lorenzo, who shared some fairly strong opinions with the media during his Saturday debrief.
"My opinion? It's a negative opinion regarding him," he said. "Yesterday in the Safety Commission he gave a really rude response. He basically told me to shove my opinion up my arse, or something like that.
"[It was] Very rude. I think that's something you shouldn't' say to any rider in front of the others, and certainly not to a five time world champion."
Lorenzo's comments came soon after Miller had miraculously escaped serious injury in a terrifying FP4 fall at the ultra-fast turn two. The Ducati man went on to say the Marc VDS man must pay greater attention to the risks involved in future outings, and compared the fall to Marc Marquez's infamous Mugello spill from 2013.
"I think that today God picked him up and said, 'Today isn't the day you get hurt." It was a similar crash to the one Marquez had in Mugello in '13. It gave him a warning that MotoGP is no joke. It's now up to him if he takes this advice onboard or not.
"In my opinion, [Miller] is one of the riders that that doesn't pay enough attention to the risk involved, he plays with it, and isn't as conscious of the risks of riding these bikes [as he should be]. But this is for him and he will know what to do."
Unexpectedly, Le Mans hasn't been a happy hunting ground for Lorenzo on the Ducati. Not only did the front tyre decision go against his wish, he finished FP3 in a woeful 23rd- last position -, before qualifying a disappointing 16th.
Speaking of the decision to change the front tyre construction from Mugello onwards, he continued, "Personally I think they were a bit hasty with the decision. They should have waited a little longer.
"The thing is this tyre was only tested at Jerez, and suddenly the riders said it was better after just one day of testing on only one kind of asphalt. For me, the feeling of the tyres changes a lot from track to track and asphalt to asphalt. We didn't have quite enough time to evaluate it.
"It's a tyre they discarded after preseason and now they've brought it back because some riders don't like the current one. It's true that the majority decided to change, but the decision was made too soon, they should have waited a little longer, for other tracks and other surfaces.
"But you have to accept that the majority has accepted this new tyre. For sure it was influenced by rider with a lot of power. The riders have more grip in the turn and we need a little more lateral grip. But we'll have to work a little harder and accept the decision of the safety commission."
On the issues that have prevented him from featuring further toward the front, he added, "I really believe that if we had more time in the dry, we would be much more competitive, but we don't have the time, and I'm still not as competitive as I was with a bike I know very well, that I was very quickly fast from the first or second lap.
"With this one, I still need to understand certain things, every time I need less time, but still I can't be as competitive as Dovi every time, as he knows the bike perfectly. We just have 30 or 40 minutes. That's not enough for me to be fast safely, and that's the problem.
"The lap time was not so bad, but the problem was that Zarco, Pedrosa, Dovizioso, there were so many fast riders in Q1, so this put me out of Q2, and I didn't have another 15 minutes to improve my lap time, and to feel better."
