Repsol Honda Team riders place third and eighth, respectively, on opening day of the French Grand Prix.
Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa completed a positive first day of practice for the French Grand Prix, the fifth round of the season that takes place this weekend at the legendary Le Mans track. The current leader of the MotoGP World Championship, Marquez was third in both Free Practice sessions on Friday, with a best time of 1:33.313. He was less than half a second off the fastest time of the day, set by Jorge Lorenzo. Teammate Pedrosa finished eighth, after leading the way in the morning session. In the second Free Practice session, the Repsol Honda Team rider improved by almost 3 tenths, concluding the day 9 tenths off the top spot.
Marc Marquez >> Audio
3rd, 1:33.313 sec, 42 laps, 175 km.
“Today was demanding. We knew this circuit would cause us to struggle a bit, but we’re overcoming things fairly well. I have a good pace and I’m feeling good, although we’re losing some time on both of this circuit’s hard acceleration points; it’s something that’s difficult to recover from afterwards. We’re working on this aspect and we’ll see if we can take another step forward tomorrow, both with the electronics and with the setup of the bike. It will also be important to make a good decision about which tyres we’ll use on Sunday, although it seems that both of the compounds we have available are pretty good.”
Dani Pedrosa >> Audio
8th, 1:33.748 sec, 40 laps, 167 km.
“We started the day well, but in the end we didn’t finish off as we had hoped. The start of the second session also went well, but after that we were evaluating some technical changes that didn’t give us the results we wanted, and made me lose pace. We won’t make many changes to the bike’s setup tomorrow, in order to try to concentrate on my riding and on improving the pace for both the race and qualifying.”
