Repsol Honda Team Pair Focus on Themselves and Saturday Improvements in Barcelona
Circuit de Barcelona-CatalunyaFriday in Barcelona saw Marc Marquez and Joan Mir work on their preparations for the weekend’s pair of races, the duo focusing on themselves as opposed to the rest of the field’s activities.
A tricky first day at home for both Repsol Honda Team riders as they continued to work on assessing the aerodynamics upgrade introduced last race. For Marc Marquez, this meant riding with the older package and then the new version in back-to-back runs to compare. The eight-time World Champion suffered a fall without consequence at Turn Five during the morning session. He would go on to finish the day in 19th with a best time of 1’40.249.
Joan Mir, who turned 26 today, finished the afternoon session in 22nd place just behind his teammate. His Friday was focused on finding a setup to best improve his feeling, especially when pushing for a single flying lap. Cooler predicted temperatures for Saturday are offering the double World Champion some hope of improvements.
Heavy downpours had been forecast ahead of the weekend, but it looks set to stay dry in the immediate future. Action resumes at 10:10 Local Time before the Sprint race begins at 15:00 Local Time in the afternoon.
Today was about focusing on ourselves, I didn’t feel bad on the bike. In the morning I made the same mistake as in Austria when I was comparing the new parts, especially with aerodynamics the bike changes a lot. In the afternoon we worked on our base and our pace, I feel good but we are far from the top. Tomorrow the objective is to achieve our best and keep working.
We were expecting it to be difficult this weekend because Montmelo is a circuit that’s always very critical for grip, the corners are very long and you need to manage the spin with the throttle. This year, this is the area we have been working on the most so we have to keep working on that here as well. I spent the day working on the setup of the bike. The goal for tomorrow is to improve the feeling so we can push more.
