Unfortunately heavy rain has ended the post-race test in Barcelona for the Repsol Honda Team after just 90 minutes. Marc Marquez went out on track as soon as the lights turned green at 10am and teammate Dani Pedrosa followed at 10h30, but they only managed a few exits before rain showers arrived, and progressively built into a heavy thunderstorm.
Nevertheless, Marc Marquez was able to complete three exits and had an opportunity to test last year’s chassis –equipped with the 2015 engine, swing arm and exhaust– and gave positive first impressions. He completed a total of twenty laps, recording his fastest time of 1’42.197 on lap three, placing him 4th fastest.
Dani Pedrosa had planned to test electronic settings, the new exhaust and some other setup parts but his test programme was also cut short, only managing sixteen laps with his fastest time of 1’42.386 arriving on lap five, leaving him 6th for the day.
The team will now head north for the Dutch TT in Assen in two weeks time.
Marc Marquez >> Audio
“We didn’t have much luck with the weather today, it started to rain very early on and we could only do three runs. The important thing is that the one point we did try –last year’s chassis with this year’s swingarm and engine gave us a positive feeling. We have to confirm our findings and compare the telemetry, because it wasn’t a huge step forward and we couldn’t do many laps, but the first impressions were good. The rain interrupted our work, but we’ll see if we can continue working in this way because I’m feeling better on the bike all the time.”
Dani Pedrosa >> Audio
“The idea we had for today was to make different adjustments to the bike and try to improve different aspects of it. But in the end we were only able to make two runs on track, and only on one of these did we test the electronics. The truth is that we couldn’t really do much more, because it started to rain a lot.”
