Phillip Island Free Practice gets underway with Marquez 2nd and Pedrosa 4th

2013-10-18 20:45
It's been a mixed day for the Repsol Honda riders, Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa, in preparation for Sunday's Australian Grand Prix.

This morning's FP1 session went according to plan with both riders putting in fast laps on the new asphalt in Phillip Island and finishing 2nd and 4th respectively. Then in FP2 this afternoon, Marc crashed at turn nine on his first run, resulting in the bike being unusable for the remainder of the session and Dani was forced to stop on track due to a mechanical problem caused by a small mistake by his team - the engine mounting bolt was not properly locked and came loose. However, Dani realised there was a problem immediately and pulled his bike safely off the track.

Marc, who after the crash went out on his second bike, was unable to improve from his morning time of 1'29.255, placing him 2nd for the day - 6th in FP2 , and Dani improved by half a second in the afternoon with a 1'29.478 leaving him 4th for this first day in Australia.

Marc Marquez
2nd 1'29.255
"The day went well - especially in the morning. It's a pity about the crash right at the start of the afternoon run but we went back out with the second bike, which had a totally different geometry and we had no time in which to change things. Thus, we used the initial setup for the entire session. We shall see if tomorrow we can regain the feeling that we had in the morning session, as I felt very good - something that is very important at Phillip Island. We shall continue working in order to improve for the race"

Dani Pedrosa
4th 1'29.478
"Today was very positive, the new asphalt felt good and the tyres worked well for us. The only setback was that we were unable to make the most of all the time available, due to a problem with the bike at the end of the afternoon session. That meant that we had to end the day early. In general it was a good day, and we shall try to improve further tomorrow"

Source: Repsol Honda Team

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