The Silverstone track has now completed its first day of MotoGP free practice, in which the Repsol Honda Team riders, Andrea Dovizioso and Dani Pedrosa finished up in third and sixth place respectively. With a totally overcast sky threatening rain, the riders enjoyed almost sixty minutes of dry asphalt although a little more than three minutes from the end, the onslaught of the rain brought the free practice session to an end. Jorge Lorenzo was the fastest rider of the day.
Maintaining the consistency which he is exhibiting this season, Andrea Dovizioso again showed himself to be one of the most competitive riders on the grid, quickly adapting to the features of this English circuit. The Repsol rider was able to take advantage of the qualities of his Honda RC212V to finish hardly three tenths off the best time, also clocking up the second fastest top speed, behind his team-mate Dani Pedrosa. The Italian and third placed at the last Grand Prix in Italy rider, stated that he liked the British track but that the many potholes made the riding very difficult.
For Dani Pedrosa, winner of the Mugello race, sixth best time in a day in which he preferred to play it safe. In a first reconnaissance, the Repsol Honda Team rider stated at the end of the session that the circuit, although he likes it very much, is especially full of potholes. Even so, Pedrosa exceeded 310 km/h on the short straights of the British track and, with a time of 2 minutes and 6.347 seconds, finished happy and was content with sixth place on the timesheets.
Dani Pedrosa, 2’07.586 sec, 21 laps, 124 km. >> Audio
“It’s funny because there was a very precise forecast of rain to arrive at 2.50pm and that’s exactly when it came – with five minutes to go – so in fact we were very lucky to have most of the session with a dry track on our first visit to Silverstone. It’s quite good fun to ride at this circuit – and it’s also pretty bumpy. You can feel the difference between the old and the new parts of the track because the old sections are bumpy and slippery whereas the new sections are quite good. There are two or three very fast corners and some long straights, and obviously we’ve started with an approximation of the right gearing and we will need to adjust this a little bit. I think that the lap times will be very different tomorrow. At the beginning of the session we had a lot of traffic because everyone was checking the track. I didn’t really push today for a lap time – I preferred to check my braking points and get my bearings. The circuit was also quite dirty especially at the start of the session, but I think it will improve tomorrow and the times will come down a lot.
Andrea Dovizioso, 2’06.347 sec, 21 laps, 124 km. >> Audio
The first impressions of Silverstone are very positive. It’s a technical track, very fast and I had a lot of fun riding here today. There are different kinds of asphalt but this is not an issue, the main difficulty is the bumps. There are many bumps and it’s difficult to control the bike because of these. I’m happy that I managed to interpret the track layout quite quickly from the beginning of the session. I had a good feeling with the bike and I think that we are starting from a good base. I also think there is a lot of room of improvement and we didn’t push too much at the end because it started raining. We didn’t test the new frame we have available here because it was important to learn the new circuit first. I hope we will have dry conditions tomorrow and for race day. Anyway the weather forecast is good so I’m optimistic we can have another good weekend”.
