Mixed Feelings For Marquez And Pedrosa On Day 1 In Jerez

A fair and sunny day welcomed Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa as the Red Bull GP of Spain got underway today in Jerez de la Frontera, the first European race of the season.

After realizing that the base setup he had started with in FP1 needed some adjustments to work as well as it had in the first three races, Marquez and his crew were quickly able to make the right choices to improve their pace in FP2, and to set the second-fastest time of the day, using the same set of tyres for the whole session.

Pedrosa had a more difficult day as he struggled to improve on the encouraging fourth-best lap time he had set in FP1, and he looks forward to the remaining sessions to take a step forward at a track he especially likes.

FP3 will commence tomorrow at 9:55 a.m. local time.

I’m happy with how this first day went overall. In the first practice session we discovered that the base setup we had in place from other circuits wasn’t working completely well for us here, but we were able to react in FP2. We’ve improved a lot, but we have to keep working because I still don’t feel entirely comfortable. The important thing is that we’re not far off Jorge [Lorenzo], who is going fastest at the moment. Valentino [Rossi] has also been very consistent, but I’m happy with how the team have been working and how they reacted to issues, so we’ll see if we can take another step forward tomorrow.

Today was similar to the situation we’ve encountered at other races this season. Unfortunately we weren’t able to make too many improvements on that as we did at Austin for the race, but of course it’s only day 1 so we’ll keep working as best we can in order to find a solution and improve our pace. At the moment we’re mainly struggling with acceleration, and these bikes are so powerful that when you lose in that area you feel it a lot. What we’ve been doing today is riding with used tyres for the entirety, and tomorrow we’ll try and take a step forward.