The first day of the Italian Grand Prix concluded with Dani Pedrosa and Marc Márquez in seventh and thirteenth positions, respectively, on a tight combined timesheet.
Dani Pedrosa has improved his time from FP1 by more than half a second in FP2, going from thirteenth to fifth position. He placed seventh overall.
In the second session, the reigning World Champion Marc Márquez was just 0.123s off his previous best time.
At one of the longest tracks on the calendar, stretching 5.245km, 16 riders finished within the same second of each other.
The temperature on track was 38ºC in FP1, and reached 54ºC in FP2.
Marc Márquez, 13th – 1:47.980 sec.
“Considering that for once the weather was very good from the beginning, and so are the forecasts for the whole weekend, we decided to work and try a few things on the bike setup and prepare as well as possible for the race. We worked on a few very different solutions, looking to improve the confidence in the front, and we therefore didn’t use the soft rear tyre option and sacrificed the fast laps a little bit. We’re struggling a bit, but I’m still quite happy because our rhythm isn’t so bad. It seems like we’re getting closer step by step. Tomorrow we’ll put it all together and try to be closer to the top.”
Dani Pedrosa, 7th – 1:47.699 sec.
“Today we worked to adapt the bike’s setup to the track and new front tyres. We struggled a little bit with the grip, but anyway, we’ve been able to test a few things on the bike and also work on the tyres. Our rhythm was constant and that’s positive, and we’ve gathered some information that we’ll use tomorrow to further improve the feeling and the lap times. We’ll try to be fast tomorrow in FP3 as that’s important for qualifying, and in FP4 we’ll work more on the race pace.”
