After his victory in the final seconds of the last Grand Prix in Italy – his first world championship win -, the young Repsol rider revs up again for the challenge this weekend and has done it in the best way possible: clocking up the best time in the first free practice for the British Grand Prix.
With a new venue – Silverstone – , the riders dedicated this first hour of testing to the challenge of learning the circuit in 60 minutes and try to ride as fast as possible with hardly any references. At the end of the first sixty minutes of practice, Marc Márquez was the one who had adapted the quickest – along with his technical team -, to this special British circuit.
As the Spanish rider correctly predicted yesterday, the Silverstone circuit is a unique track, different from the other circuits that the Motorcycle World Championship visits – in addition to being one of the longest with its 5.902 meters-, which makes it considerably more difficult to learn. In his first ever ride out, the Repsol rider dedicated the sixty minutes available to try out some basic adjustments to the set up of the suspension, ride and engine. Starting from the base given to the teams from the factory, Márquez did twenty-two laps and almost 130 kilometers, clocking up a best time of 2 minutes and 15, 835 seconds.
After the first free practice, the Repsol rider concluded that he is dealing with one of the most complicated circuits in the calendar, with quite fast sections and some of the slowest turns in the World Championship. The most negative point of the track is the many potholes on the highest speed corners, a factor which will demand the attention of the whole team this afternoon and tomorrow to achieve an improvement in the set up with a view to the race on Sunday.
Marc Márquez, 2’15.835 sec., 22 laps, 130 km. >> Audio
“The work today has gone quite well. It was a completely new track so we changed the work schedule, doing a lot of series of laps, longer than we do normally. In the end I managed to be quite consistent even though it was difficult to always maintain the same line on such a long circuit. I finished first, although at the moment that’s the least of considerations, the important thing is that we have a positive feeling and to know that we have room for improvement. We´ll see tomorrow if we can continue to improve, as it´s a track that I liked and it´s not like any other. There are some very fast sections and some very slow corners. The worst thing is that there are some sections with a lot of potholes”.
