The eight-time World Champion began his second Grand Prix of the season with two Free Practice sessions at the Circuito de Jerez-Ángel Nieto. In the morning, Márquez was very competitive, maintaining a good pace throughout the session and setting the third best time, just over 2 tenths off the top spot.
In the afternoon, in FP2, the Spaniard was unable to improve his pace and ended the day in sixteenth position, with a best time of 1:38.295 just over a second off the pace.
Pol Espargaró had two sessions similar to those of his teammate. He was only 420 thousandths from the fastest lap in the morning, finishing in eighth.
In the second Free Practice, he clocked a 1:38.115 to round off the day in fourteenth.
Riders Statements
“The approach of the weekend is a bit different to Portimao, our aim is to keep our physical condition more constant throughout the weekend, so we weren’t pushing as much today. Tomorrow is the time to push and overall, I feel quite good on the bike, I’m happy with where we are at this moment. There’s still some work to do on the physical side of things, my position on the bike is still not perfect but we are able to push when we need to. We keep working on everything and improving step by step.”
“At the end of the day we couldn’t take the most profit from the new tyre, so our position is a little lower than it could have been. But we have been working a lot to understand the limits of the bike and where we can push. We already feel better with the bike than we did in Portimao and I think we can achieve something interesting on Saturday. The goal is Q2 but our race pace is not looking too bad. It’s good to be at such a familiar track with more consistent conditions.”