Marc Márquez leads the way at MotorLand with Dani Pedrosa seventh

The World Championship leader was fourth in the first free practice, and improved his time by almost a second and a half in the afternoon to top the combined timesheets.

Dani Pedrosa also lowered his FP1 time by one and a half seconds, going from eighteenth to seventh position in FP2.

Marc Márquez

Today we worked quite well and improved a lot from morning to afternoon, especially with the rear tyre. It was our first day at the track this season and we had to adjust the setting of the bike and the electronics. We must also keep working in this way tomorrow. In the end of FP2 everyone put on a new rear tyre, even us. This was maybe the first Friday that we did that this year! It’s important for understanding the outcome of a few things we changed on the bike. Now we have less doubts, but also we want to reconfirm something tomorrow. Luckily the weather is fine, and actually very hot. Ducati has tested here so we don’t want to leave anything out in order to be at same level.

Dani Pedrosa

Today we mainly concentrated on testing the tyres, suspension, and on getting the feeling with the track. Conditions were quite hot and apparently they’re going to stay that way during the weekend, so it’s important to try and get a good feeling for the race. We didn’t put fresh tyres on at the end of FP1, but we did it for the last run in the afternoon. We couldn’t improve our lap time as we wished with the soft tyre, so we need to look into this, as well as keep working on our race pace.