Today was good because we were able to keep a good pace especially in FP2 on hard tyres.
Marc Márquez finished the morning practice session third, just 181 thousands of a second off the best time.
In the afternoon, the reigning MotoGP World Champion opted to ride with used tyres for the entire session and occupied 10th place overall.
Dani Pedrosa was seventh in the first Free Practice session and, after improving his time by almost a second and a half in FP2, ended the day as the fastest rider with a time of 1:55.976.
Dani Pedrosa
Today was good because we were able to keep a good pace especially in FP2 on hard tyres. We did a good job there and then also in the final part of the session when we fit a soft rear. That was important because we normally struggle with the soft tyre while today we had a good feeling and good speed. That said, we’ll keep our feet on the ground because not every rider put the soft tyre on today and we need to repeat the performance tomorrow in qualifying. Regarding the final tyre choice for the race I think we’ll need to make more tests tomorrow.
Marc Márquez
We started with a good setup because we did a really good test here one month ago. The conditions are different as it’s extremely hot now and that means we had to adjust the setup. We’ve worked on it, and already we’re used to spending the whole first session on medium tyres and the second one on hard tyres, which I was able to make a good final lap time with, so we can say that we’re happy with how the day went. We’re a bit behind in the ranking but we worked well on the rhythm and we’re close in terms of the gap from the top. Dovi has done many laps on used tyres and Dani has also has been fast today so let’s wait and see, tomorrow we’ll understand better where we all are. So far, we think the hard front tyre will be the choice for Sunday while we need to make more tests for the rear choice. They say it may rain on Sunday but I hope it’ll stay dry, even if it’s very hot, because it’s less risky to make mistakes. Of course in case of rain we’ll try and make a good race!