Dani Pedrosa 4th, Marc Marquez 5th on opening day at Aragon

The MotorLand Aragon circuit hosted the first day of practice for the fourteenth round of the MotoGP season on Friday, and the Repsol Honda Team riders used the two practice sessions available to focus their work on race pace ahead of Sunday’s showdown. Dani Pedrosa and Marc Marquez finished fourth and fifth, respectively, in a combined timesheet topped by Jorge Lorenzo.

Marc Marquez took second place in the morning session at MotorLand Aragon, with Pedrosa in fourth. In the second free practice session, both improved their lap times, with Pedrosa going fourth again with time of 1:48.358. He was 8 tenths off a strong Jorge Lorenzo, but just 0.158 off second place. Repsol Honda teammate Marc Marquez was fifth, stopping the clock at 1:48.401. The reigning World Champion was just 0.043s off Pedrosa’s time.

Tomorrow will see a second day of practice, with two new free practice sessions leading into qualifying to decide the grid for Sunday.

Marc Marquez
“Today was a day in which we tried a lot of things out; with both the front and the rear, we ran hard and medium tyres in order to have a better understanding of their performance for Sunday. We also worked on the setup of the bike, which is an area where we still have room for improvement. We must also take into account that Jorge is riding at a high level; he rode two great sessions today and is a small step ahead of us. Dani is also riding with a very strong pace. Let’s see if tomorrow we can continue to improve and get up to the same level as Jorge.”

Dani Pedrosa
“Today we had some problems with the general settings and also with the brakes and so I had to stay in the garage to resolve them and we could not put in all the laps we would have liked. We were able to test the tyres -both the hard and medium compounds- although I do not know yet which will be the right choice. The medium is faster but it is unknown whether it can last the entire race. I hope that tomorrow we can have more track time, in order to continue working to improve our pace and have a good qualifying session.”