Repsol Honda riders complete first day of action at the Czech GP with Dani Pedrosa seventh and Marc Márquez tenth, respectively.
The first Free Practice session took place in rainy conditions, and Márquez set the second fastest time. Repsol Honda teammate Pedrosa was fourth.
The track dried out just minutes into FP2, although the fastest time of the day -set by Andrea Dovizioso- was almost half a second slower than that of Márquez one year ago.
Dani Pedrosa led for much of the afternoon session, with Márquez second. But in the final minutes other riders improved their lap times.
Marc Márquez, 10th | 1:57.209 sec.
“I’m happy enough with today because we were quite strong in the wet this morning. I felt comfortable on the bike and that’s important in case we have rain on Sunday. Then in the afternoon, in the dry, the grip was a bit less compared to the test we did here in July, but the general feeling was quite similar. We tried something different on the chassis’ setup, but tomorrow we’ll return to the settings we found in July, when we were able to set a good pace. We used a new fairing that I felt good enough with, so we’ll keep it for the whole weekend and will continue working hard to prepare for Sunday.”
Dani Pedrosa, 7th | 1:56.933 sec.
“Today was good because we were able to do a good test in wet conditions. We actually didn’t expect the rain, or at least not so much rain, but all in all it was good because after having tested here in the dry during the summer break, we now had the chance to verify in different conditions the small changes we had made on the bike. This afternoon we basically had half an hour in the dry, but that was also positive in general. We used a new fairing that we had tested in July; we’re still learning about it and are setting up the bike for it little by little, in order to see what level it may bring us to. We didn’t fit a soft tyre at the end and just continued on with the same one. Now we’ll wait for the track to be dry tomorrow and to get some rubber on it.”
