Espargaro trails championship leader Francesco Bagnaia by 27 points coming into the penultimate round of the year and needs to be at least fourth to keep his hopes alive if the Ducati rider is not on the podium.
But the one-time race winner’s Friday at Sepang got off to a miserable start, as a clutch problem led to a crash in FP1, before an engine issue forced him to park up for the remainder of the session.
Missing out on the only dry running of the day as FP2 – in which he was 20th – was rain-affected, Espargaro sits outside of the provisional Q2 places.
Espargaro was critical of Aprilia after the Australian GP last weekend as he felt the marque has not recently lived up to the potential it showed in the first part of the season, and doubled down on this on Friday in Malaysia.
“I was a little bit critical with our performance in general, with the team performance in the last races after the race of Australia,” Espargaro began.
“And it looked like from the team and from the journalists I was too critical. But today you can analyse my FP1, it is how it is, the results are there.
“We are in the second part of the championship and we have not been at the level we were in the first part of the season. I can’t do anything else.
“I really believe in this team and I really believe we can fight for the title if we do the same things we did in the first part of this championship without any doubt.
“Actually, if I did more or less similar [results] to the first half of the championship, I would be leading now. So, hopefully we can learn from this.
“I’m very proud of what we achieved this year. The bike is completely in another level from all the other RS-GPs.
“This bike is very competitive. But I feel there is not enough to fight for the title, even if we are near the end of the season and we still have some possibilities.
“But for sure we will learn about this. I’m really convinced 100% that next year will be better than this.”
Espargaro says he knows “clearly” why Aprilia in recent years has struggled in the second half of a season, but says this is a matter that must be “discussed internally” and wouldn’t divulge any more information other than perhaps development across the year has been lacking.
“I mean, the bike is exactly the same from the Malaysia test,” he added.
“But you cannot really improve the bike a lot during the season. The bike we had in the test was really competitive, but during the season if you analyse the top speed from the beginning of the season to now I cannot overtake anyone on the straight.
“At the beginning of the season the Aprilia was fast, I overtook on the straight quite easy.”
