Repsol Honda Team riders finish the first day at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with Pedrosa setting the eighth best time and Márquez, who suffered a crash, twelfth.
The first Free Practice session ended with Márquez in fourth place and Pedrosa twelfth.
In the second session, Pedrosa improved his time by eight tenths to end the day eighth overall, with Márquez twelfth.
The reigning MotoGP World Champion crashed when entering Turn 4 in the final minutes of FP2, which prevented him from lowering his times.
MARC MÁRQUEZ | 12th 1’39.990
“Looking at the standings today, you could say we’re quite far back, but actually we’re not bad at all and most importantly, we worked very well on used tyres and have a good rhythm. We still have a small thing to adjust in the electronics setup, but we think we understand where we have to work; if we’re able to sort it out, we’ll have the possibility to improve a lot tomorrow. It seems that with the new asphalt, everything is very, very tight, and it’s more difficult to make a difference. There’s big difference between lapping on new tyres and on old tyres, so we must manage that aspect well.”
DANI PEDROSA | 8th 1’39.655
“I think today was positive enough, as we were able to improve our rhythm over the course of the day, after a slow start. We managed to exploit the track time quite well, testing a lot of tyres. That’s also good from the perspective of the work we’re doing, because we already understand which one we want to work with. I think that’s an important step in view of the race. Another significant aspect we would like to improve is our speed over a single lap, but as I said, we gained some pace today and I’m happy with that.”
