Sarath Kumar at Qatar MotoGP 2011

Well, it seems that there are very few things which go right at the very first attempt, but the valiant always fights back and comes victorious. India's face in MotoGP, Sarath Kumar, was had some real tough luck going and missed to qualify for the Qatar MotoGP race.

In what can be called as a series of unfortunate events, in the first practice session, after 4 laps, an unknown external object flew into the air-box and damaged the carburetor. After mechanical inspection of the damage, it was ruled that Sarath would have to retire from the practice session.

It hasn’t been easy; it’s the first time that I face such peculiar conditions, moreover at my first race. At night the lighting is reduced and besides all, I’ve been very unlucky because I had a very rare and unusual mechanical problem right while I was doing well, so I couldn’t continue the practice session. For this very first race of mine, my target above all is to finish it; the position is important as well but at least for now, I think that the priority object is to learn and improve myself

But thankfully, Sarath's second practice session went on fine, and he was able to improve upon his lap times by good numbers

Today it’s been very good: I’ve lowered my best lap time and tomorrow I want to push harder because I only need to get rid of a handful of seconds to be able to get qualified. I had more time to run unlike yesterday’s bad luck, so I got more confidence with the track, I got accustomed to the night lighting and I improved my riding style. My first race is an extremely important date for me, I want to be there so tomorrow I want to improve much more

Unfortunately though, during the entire practice session, Sarath's bike was plagued with technical glitches, which coupled with a crash during one of the qualifying sessions, sealed off Sarath's chances to the final race, when he was almost right there, by the rule of 107 percent, which says, that in order to qualify for the final race, the rider must lap within the 107 percent of the pole position time during the qualifying race. Going my MotoGP standards, where sub-seconds decide the results, Sarath was a massive 9 seconds off.

Sarath's next opportunity to make it big would be at Jerez circuit, Spain, in about two weeks time.