MotoGP: ‘Important’ for Marquez to be comfortable in the wet

Marc Marquez says that the opening day of MotoGP action at the Czech Grand Prix was an important experience for him, after wet conditions in the morning gave the championship leader the opportunity to find his feet on the slippery Brno circuit.

But despite coming home in tenth place, the Repsol Honda rider was more than upbeat at the end of the day thanks to their progress.

“I’m happy enough with today because we were quite strong in the wet this morning. I felt comfortable on the bike and that’s important in case we have rain on Sunday. Then in the afternoon, in the dry, the grip was a bit less compared to the test we did here in July, but the general feeling was quite similar. We tried something different on the chassis’ setup, but tomorrow we’ll return to the settings we found in July, when we were able to set a good pace. We used a new fairing that I felt good enough with, so we’ll keep it for the whole weekend and will continue working hard to prepare for Sunday.”

Teammate Dani Pedrosa, who finished top Honda in seventh on the combined time sheets, was even more positive than Marquez, admitting that they’d had a valuable chance to test out what the Japanese manufacturer had developed over the four-week summer break.

“Today was good because we were able to do a good test in wet conditions. We actually didn’t expect the rain, or at least not so much rain, but all in all it was good because after having tested here in the dry during the summer break, we now had the chance to verify in different conditions the small changes we had made on the bike.

“This afternoon we basically had half an hour in the dry, but that was also positive in general. We used a new fairing that we had tested in July; we’re still learning about it and are setting up the bike for it little by little, in order to see what level it may bring us to. We didn’t fit a soft tyre at the end and just continued on with the same one. Now we’ll wait for the track to be dry tomorrow and to get some rubber on it.”