Pedrosa happy with first practice result

This weekend, the MotoGP World Championship visits Spain for the second time this season for the Catalunya Grand Prix, a very special event, which Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso have started well. The first free practice in Catalunya has ended with Jorge Lorenzo topping the timesheets, followed by Stoner and the Repsol Honda Team riders, both just three and four-tenths, respectively, off the best time.

Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso have had a good start, just five days after the race in Holland. Progressing from low to high, both riders have started to prepare the set-up of their Honda RC212Vs, on which they will launch another attack for first place on Sunday. Although Dovizioso rapidly got into the top four, Pedrosa’s evolution required a few more adaptation laps.

Dani Pedrosa followed his own strategy, starting the free practice session with the hardest compound tyre, on which he thinks he will race on Sunday, to then switch to the softest compound tyres for the last ten minutes. He achieved his best time in lap 24 of the 25 he completed, with a time of 1 minute, 43 seconds and 631 milliseconds, three-tenths behind Lorenzo.

Tomorrow morning, the second free practice session will be held at the Circuit de Catalunya. In the afternoon, Sunday’s starting grid will be defined, after the battle for pole position in the qualifying session.

Dani Pedrosa: “I’m quite happy with the first session today. It’s not going to be easy to improve our lap times but for the first practice I’m reasonably happy with the bike. We started with the hard option Bridgestone tyre and then on the last outing we changed to the soft one, and this was the opposite way of working to most of the other riders so it’s natural that we moved forward towards the end of the session. We can see that we have to improve the grip and so we have to work a little bit more on the chassis set-up for this. The temperature was very high today, and the track surface temperature especially, and this affects the levels of grip. We started at the point where we finished in Assen and the bike feels ok. We have to discuss all the details from today in our team meeting tonight but I think we have found a decent direction. In general I’m quite happy so fa r. Already I can feel the anticipation building for this race and the support from my home fans so I’m excited about the rest of the weekend.”

Source: Repsol Media Service