Second row for Márquez and Pedrosa

Our speed is there and I’m happy with that

twittear

Marc Márquez finished fifth in Q2, claiming his best time on his first stint: 1’47.963.

On his second outing on track, the World Championship leader suffered a crash at Turn 12, when attempting his first hot lap.

Dani Pedrosa will start from sixth position, rounding off the second row of the grid, after clocking a time of 1’48.107.

Marc Márquez

Today wasn’t easy because with conditions completely different from yesterday, we started from zero and maybe we didn’t immediately find the best direction with the setup of the bike. I was fast in FP3 but actually I wasn’t feeling perfectly comfortable. We made some changes for FP4 and I finally felt good on my last run with used tyres. That’s positive and we’ll keep working in that direction in the warm-up to further improve the setup. In qualifying I probably pushed a bit too much, went wide, and crashed. So, second row is not the best, but our speed is there and I’m happy with that. We need to analyse everything and make a good tyre choice, which will be challenging as we don’t have much data, but anyway, I think we have the pace to fight for the podium.

Dani Pedrosa

Today we tried to do the best work possible for the dry conditions, working as much as we could on our bike’s setup and on tyres. We didn’t have much time to try everything we wanted, so we made the choices we think will work better for the race. I was able to lap fast in FP3 and FP4, while in qualifying unfortunately I wasn’t able to do two very good laps. Anyway, we have to look to tomorrow now, to finalize the setup in the warm-up, and to correctly choose the tyres. Marc [Márquez] and Maverick [Viñales] look very strong, so we must keep focused and try to make no mistakes.