First session at Losail for Dani Pedrosa and Marc Marquez, who finish seventh and eighth, respectively.
The 2016 MotoGP World Championship season got underway this Thursday, at the floodlit Losail International Circuit in Qatar. The premier class riders had their first Free Practice session of the event, lasting 45 minutes. After putting in 16 laps, Dani Pedrosa placed seventh with a time of 1:56.98, 0.658s off the fastest rider of the evening, Jorge Lorenzo. Eighth was Marc Marquez, who on the last of his 15 laps stopped the clock at 1:56.258. Both Repsol Honda riders continued the work begun in testing at the track two weeks ago, trying out the new front winglets and various adjustments to the setups of their Honda RC213V bikes.
Marc Marquez
“Today the 2016 season started for real. It was not the easiest FP1 I’ve ridden in, but we tried to improve gradually. The feeling was not very good, but we worked hard and we tried a lot of things out, so now we have to see what has changed between the test and today. We know that in Qatar the track conditions change a lot, so we will try to continue to evolve and get close to the top riders.”
Dani Pedrosa
“Luckily, the track was in good condition and this practice was a useful start for us to gather information, because we started working on the setup we used on the last day of test and then decided to try a big change. We need to work more on this idea and I hope tomorrow we’ll be able to build on it. We’ll study the data we’ve gathered very thoroughly in order to improve in the direction we feel could make the bike faster. We’ll try to reduce the gap, tenth by tenth, working on power delivery and chassis settings.”
