Difficult day for Repsol Moto3 riders who, despite improving their times from Friday, place eighth ‒Rins‒ and eleventh ‒Marquez.
Work at the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit continued on Saturday, with qualifying for the GP of Argentina. Alex Rins and Alex Marquez will start from the third and fourth rows, respectively, for the South American race. Emilio Alzamora’s proteges took a step forward in the sessions ‒topped by Jack Miller‒ and continued to lower their times.
In the third practice session, Marquez was just 4 tenths off the Australian and was third quickest. However, after shaving 3 tenths off his time in qualifying to set a 1:50.185 lap on his last time around, he placed eleventh on the grid. Eighth was Rins, who bested his Friday top time by more than a second in the morning, then clocked a 1:49.918 lap in qualifying after further progress.
Tomorrow Rins and Marquez will take off from the middle of rows three and four, respectively, for the race at 11am local time.
Alex Rins >> Audio >>
8th, 1:49.918 sec, 36 laps, 173 km
“We’ve taken a big step forward, improving a lot from Friday thanks to the hard work that we have been doing with the team. I am happy; obviously there are riders who are a step ahead of us at the moment but in the race, with the wear that the tyres are suffering, I don’t think that they will be as fast. If they do, then we will try to latch onto them. If we can’t do that, then we will look to take as many points as possible.”
Alex Marquez >> Audio>>
11th, 1:50.185 sec, 34 laps, 163 km
“It is clear that in the morning we took a step forward compared to yesterday. I was much closer to the top time and felt more comfortable on the bike. In the afternoon we tried a different setup for the bike, which didn’t work as we had hoped and didn’t let me ride as I like. In warmup we will go back to this morning’s setup, as I think that it was working well and still leaves us with room for improvement. In the race we shall try to take a good start, because as we saw in Austin Miller and Vazquez will try to open up a gap from the start. We shall need to overtake riders ahead of us in order to be able to play our cards on the final laps.”
