Marc Marquez & Dani Pedrosa immediately on the pace at Valencia

The final round of the MotoGP World Championship season began today in Valencia, with Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa amongst the fastest riders of the day. Based in a garage decorated with the names of 2,000 fans who wanted to show their support via boxrepsol.com, the reigning World Champion and his Repsol Honda teammate –winner of the last race at Sepang– finished second and third, respectively, on a combined timesheet headed by Jorge Lorenzo.

First in the opening practice session with a time of 1:31.250, Marquez finished second on the combined timesheet but could not improve his times in the afternoon –in which he was fifth. Pedrosa –third in FP1 and second in FP2 after cutting two tenths off his times– ended the day with the third best time of 1:31.377.

With the first day of free practice done, tomorrow Marquez and Pedrosa will have another two sessions before facing qualifying for the season finale.

Marc Marquez
“I’m happy because I went out on track and got back to enjoying myself riding; it was important and something I was really looking forward to doing. It’s been a positive day because we did a good job with the setup of the bike. In the second session we worked hard with Sunday’s race in mind, riding with used tyres and also testing the hardest compound. We are pretty clear about how we can continue to improve tomorrow, because the track temperature increased a lot and if it stays like this, we will have to concentrate on the durability of the tyre.”

Dani Pedrosa
“Even though we finished third for the day, it’s not been a great start to the GP. My first feeling when I went out on track this morning was that we needed a bit more grip with the rear. We spent most of the day working on this issue and we must continue to work on the bike setup tomorrow to solve this small problem and to be faster for qualifying. I’m not sure how the race will play out at the moment, I’m just focusing on improving for tomorrow.”

Source: Repsol Honda