Marc Márquez was again the leading player in the second qualifying session of the year. The Repsol rider was the fastest in the official session, beating the Jerez Circuit official record, the venue of tomorrow’s Spanish Grand Prix, which Márquez will start from the first position on the grid; the same position he occupied in the first race of the year in Qatar three weeks ago.
Second in both yesterday and this morning’s free practices, Márquez took the step he needed to clock up the best time in his class. The Repsol rider feels comfortable at this circuit, as he proved during the pre-season tests when he beat the circuit record by a significant margin. He rode under one minute and forty-six seconds again today, clocking up a time of 1 minute, 46 seconds and 829 milliseconds, a little over one tenth faster than the previous record, held since 2006 by Mattia Pasini.
During the free practice, the Repsol rider tried the chassis setup and fine-tuning he used in both the pre-season and yesterday and focused on continuing to work on the tyre choice, a key factor for tomorrow’s race. Sure and confident with the setup of his machine, in the official session, he concentrated on finding a good pace for tomorrow’s race and despite the traffic that he came across on the track; he was able to lower his times until he took first place on the grid. He still had time to do another five laps, keeping up the fast pace, although he did not lower his times any further, neither did his rivals mange to beat him.
Marc Márquez, 1’46.829 sec, 36 laps, 159 KM >> Audio
“I took the pole for the second time running, two out of two, but they don’t give out championship points in the qualifying, so we’ll have to keep very focused for tomorrow and try to get off to a good start. We have the setup quite clear here, more so than in Qatar, where we had a few doubts. We’ve got a good pace and we’ve come prepared from the pre-season tests; so I think that if we keep focused we can put in a good race. I’m sure that, as always, it will be a group race, with Pol [Espargaró], Nico [Terol], Efrén [Vázquez] and some others, but we’ll try to reduce it as much as possible pushing hard from the start. It won’t be an easy race and in front of the Spanish crowd, we’ll have to keep focused because too much eagerness can play tricks on you”.
