Marc Márquez is keeping focused and maintaining his level of competitiveness on what is undoubtedly the most important weekend in his sporting career. Detached from the expectation surrounding him, the Repsol rider and his team are maintaining their work method, step-by-step, with their sights set on tomorrow’s race. The good pace showed on the track this afternoon and his ability to ride fast even in heavy traffic have allowed him to claim another pole, his twelfth of the season.
In the free practice session held at nine o’clock this morning with temperatures that reached just 12ºC, Márquez set the pace for a large part of the session, demonstrating a good pace that allowed him to lower the times he registered yesterday on a track that reached just 8ºC – 11ºC in the sunniest parts –. In the end, he was only beaten by 2 milliseconds, when Pol Espargaró registered a time of 1 minute, 40 seconds and 196 milliseconds.
When the decisive moment of the day arrived, the qualifying session, Márquez did not take long to set a good pace, taking part in a nice battle for the last pole of the season with his only rival in the title fight, Nico Terol. The Repsol rider did 18 laps on a day of heavy traffic on the track, stopping the clock at 1 minute, 39 seconds and 564 milliseconds, one tenth faster than Terol. The front row of the starting grid will be completed by Bradley Smith and Sandro Cortese.
This pole, his twelfth this season, equals the record set by another Repsol rider, Mick Doohan, in 1997. Both riders are the only ones to hold this record.
Marc Márquez, 1’39.564 sec., 36 laps, 144 km/h >> Audio
“For tomorrow, the main goal is to keep the same mentality. We are at a very good level and have to try to maintain the same level of concentration as today and yesterday because I feel very secure and I’m having fun on the bike. We know that we can improve a few things for tomorrow but at the moment we are calm. I think that everything will work out but obviously Nico [Terol], as he demonstrated in today’s qualifying, is at a very high level. It’s important to start from pole position but we must keep calm because tomorrow we have more than a race, the Championship is at stake, so we must concentrate hard while trying to keep calm”.
