The MotoGP World Champion was 93 thousandths of a second off the best time of the day, whilst Dani Pedrosa finished 27 thousandths of a second outside the Top 10.
The first session at the Sepang International Circuit ended with Marc Márquez tenth on the timesheets and Dani Pedrosa sixteenth.
In the second Free Practice session, Márquez improved his best time by 1.1 seconds and placed second; third overall on a day in which Álex Rins was fastest.
His Repsol Honda teammate, Dani Pedrosa, improved by 8 tenths in FP2 for eleventh overall.
Marc Marquez:
“All in all it was a good day for us. This morning I felt good, but this afternoon we struggled a lot at the beginning of the FP2 session: I had some moments and had to save it a few times. Finally, we changed the front tyre from hard to medium and on the last run we managed to improve our speed and our lap time. Anyway, we need to work very hard on our race pace. We’ll try a different setup to see if we can manage the front tyre better. We need to take a step forward if we want to get closer to Dovizioso, who at the moment is the fastest guy out there.”
Dani Pedrosa:
“We didn’t really have a good feeling today—not much grip on the rear, and we also struggled a lot in turning. I wasn’t able to make the pace that I’d like to have here. We improved the lap time in the afternoon, but the grip was even worse. We need to improve the bike’s setup because so far we don’t have the feeling we had in the test here. We have to figure out what to do for tomorrow and keep working hard. It will be important to go out tomorrow and try to improve.”
