Marc Márquez places second on rainy first day at Le Mans

The feeling was good already, but the most important thing was to be able to be fast in the full wet in FP2

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The first Free Practice session for the French Grand Prix started with a wet track, which dried out progressively. A selection of riders finished the morning running slick tyres.

Marc Márquez was second overall, 1 second off Jack Miller’s time, although the mixed conditions of the track meant that even the best times were over 5 seconds off the circuit record. Dani Pedrosa placed fourteenth.

The second session featured a completely wet surface after a shower fell between FP1 and FP2. Times were almost 3 seconds slower than in the morning. Márquez was again second, 0.043s off Andrea Dovizioso, and Pedrosa was twenty-first.

Marc Márquez

It’s positive to have started well today, as here in Le Mans it’s important to be ready for any kind of conditions. This morning there were mixed conditions with the track drying toward the end, allowing us to do the last exit on slicks. The feeling was good already, but the most important thing was to be able to be fast in the full wet in FP2. We worked a bit on the rain settings and in our second run I started to feel really good on the bike. We’ll see how the conditions are tomorrow; it looks like it will be dry and I hope that’s actually the case because it seems that the race also will be a dry one and it will be important to set up the bike well. The new surface is incredible, at least from what we could see in the wet. The grip is very good and even if it’s not easy to put temperature in the tyres, when you do get it you can be really fast.

Dani Pedrosa

Today it was a little bit difficult because in the morning we had quite changeable conditions, starting on the wet and finishing on an almost dry track. I changed to slicks a little bit too late and I couldn’t improve my lap time. This afternoon for some reason we weren’t able to put the right temperature into the rear tyre, so I had no grip. We tried to fix it but we couldn’t. We would like to understand why that happened but in any case we’ll focus on tomorrow. It seems we’ll have an improvement in the weather and therefore in the track conditions for the rest of the weekend, so we’ll work to improve our feeling and prepare well for the race.