Marquez hoping for dry race, starting from second row
After achieving his first victory in Moto2 two weeks ago in Le Mans, Marc Márquez will try to keep getting good results in the category tomorrow at the Catalunya Grand Prix. Today’s sessions allowed the young Repsol rider to improve yesterday’s times and secure the fifth position on the starting grid.
In the last free practice session held in the morning, the rider from Cervera set the third fastest time, after improving the registers he set yesterday. Márquez followed the usual working line of the team, making slight changes each time got on track and, after improving steadily, he had enough confidence to keep a competitive pace consistently.
The Repsol rider started the qualifying again with caution, paying special attention to the weather, as in the last corner of the circuit fell some raindrops. As minutes went by and after making some adjustments to the rear shock of his Moto2, Marc Márquez was able to set three fast laps under 1 minute and 48 seconds.
The Repsol rider stopped the clock with a fastest time of 1 minute, 47 seconds and 154 thousandths, a register that provisionally placed him in the first row of the starting grid. He had time to do another four laps, but the traffic did not allow him to improve his time and two rivals improved it, pushing him back to a final fifth position, in the middle of the second row of tomorrow’s starting grid.
Marc Márquez FP3 – 1:47.457, 19 laps, 90 km. QP – 1:47.154, 19 laps, 90 km.
“It is clear that we have improved steadily during the weekend, because in the first practice I made a mistake and that made me lose a very valuable time on track. We slowly found a good set-up, but we will still need to make the most of the ‘warm-up’ tomorrow.
I hope we are lucky and we have a dry race tomorrow, although they say the weather forecast is not very good. I am happy with the time I set, as I did several laps with a very good pace and that will be useful for the race.
I will try to have a good start and, here at my home race, the aim will be to finish. Then we will see which result we can get but we will do our best, as in all races”.
Source: Repsol Media