Due to rain cancelling all scheduled sessions for Saturday night, the MotoGP grid has been decided by the combined times of the three Free Practice sessions. Marc Márquez will start from third position and Pedrosa from seventh.
- Track conditions, following heavy rain last night and this afternoon, prevented riders in all three categories from being able to ride today.
- Marc Márquez will start from the front row in Qatar for the fourth consecutive year.
- In Doha it rains on average 8.8 days a year, with about 75 millilitres of total rainfall. March is the second wettest month of the year, averaging 1.8 wet days and a total of 16.1 millilitres -a tiny amount.
Marc Márquez
3rd1:54.912
“Starting on front row for us is good, though this was not the best way to achieve this result. I would have like to have time today to work more for the race but you can nothing against the weather and first of all you must think to safety. It would have been too dangerous to ride as it had rained quite heavily both overnight and this morning. And, in the end, we have made more than three hundred laps at this track, considering the recent test and the weekend, and that means that everybody have already the setup and his own fast or less fast pace, and everybody knows already where he is for the race. On our side we know that a podium would be a great result for us and we will try to go for it. We will have a longer warmup and we’ll see how the grip and everything is. Probably for the MotoGP race it will be already ok as Moto3 and Moto2 will race before us but we will see. I hope that the track will be dry enough, and the weather will be stable”.
Dani Pedrosa
7th – 1:55.113
“I think that the decision of cancelling the sessions today was right as safety always comes first. Said that, I would have liked doing the qualifying and to have the chance to improve my lap time, as I knew that otherwise I would have had to start from seventh place. Tomorrow, in the warmup, will we see how the track will be: that will be our main concern, to see how much dirty it is, how much sand is there, and how much of it will remain. More or less the tyres’ choice has been done and it will be important to be able to make them working well. For the rest I do not think there will be the possibility to try something on the setup because the conditions will prevent to have the right references. We’ll wait and see how the real conditions will be tomorrow and we’ll do our best”.
