Repsol Honda team riders go straight through to Q2 tomorrow. Both continued working on the setup of their bikes on Friday night.
- Rainfall during the day threatened the second day of practice, although finally the sessions took place without a hitch.
- Dani Pedrosa improved on his best time from yesterday by one tenth of a second, achieving exactly the same time as a year ago: 1:55.113.
- Marc Márquez completed 51 laps -more than 274 kilometres- between the 3 sessions (18 in FP1, 18 in FP2 and 15 in FP3). Dani Pedrosa put in 49 laps -263km- (16 laps yesterday in FP1, 17 in FP2 and 16 in FP3).
- Only three riders set a time under the 1:55 mark in the three sessions: Viñales, Iannone and Márquez.
Marc Márquez
3rd – 1’54.914
“Today the track was a bit different from yesterday and it was more demanding to find the pace and a fast lap. Yesterday I had felt very good, but today we made many changes to the bike, looking for more grip and to improve on corner exit, but we didn’t get the results we were hoping for. So now we’ll re-check everything, and tomorrow we’ll take a little step back with the settings. A positive point from today is that we again found the confidence in the front that was missing yesterday. Also, the feeling on used tyres this afternoon wasn’t bad. Anyway, we still have work to do to improve our rhythm to be able to fight for the podium on Sunday.”
Dani Pedrosa
7th – 1’55.113
“In today’s first session we started making some little changes to the setup to continue improving our feeling. However, the day wasn’t the best for getting good feedback because the rain and sand made the surface very dirty and the grip very low, especially during the earlier session. In the end we just decided to not change the setup so much and to wait for the track to improve a little bit in FP3, when we worked for the race. Tomorrow we’ll see what weather we have, as we’d like to improve the mapping and the bike’s general setup a little bit more, besides trying to make a good tyre choice.”
