Marc Márquez was second in the MotoGP Catalan GP Sprint race, but he had to make a big recovery to get there. The Gresini man once again struggled in qualifying, starting from 14th.
The eight-time world champion explained how he was able to make such significant gains between qualifying and the Sprint race: ‘Simply with two or three laps on the tires I feel better, and we need to understand why. In Le Mans I had a bit of the same feeling and here once again. When the tires are brand new, I have difficulties. I had difficulties already in pre-season, then it seems that I was able to compensate a bit in the first races, but now I am having difficulties again with the new tires and it’s something we need to work on very deeply because if we start from the first two or three rows it’s a different race. When you start from 14th, you are very penalized in your race strategy. At the moment we are able to salvage‘.
According to Márquez, only after the first few laps did he start to feel the potential of the bike, admitting that in qualifying this cannot happen: ‘In the first two laps my feeling was terrible, and then I felt like I was going to lose the front end in some area. In fact, in the first two laps I was even having some difficulties following [Enea] Bastianini, who was in front of me. But then, on the third lap, I started to feel the potential and began to attack the others. The most important thing is that if you have difficulties for three laps in the race, you have 20 laps ahead. But I don’t like this feeling, because in qualifying you need to have that potential, otherwise you can’t do anything and that’s where we need to improve‘.
But that is not the only aspect that the pilot considers needs improvement, as he stated: ‘It is true that we need to improve a lot on Fridays, because with today’s lap time I would start from the third row – that is still acceptable on a circuit where I have difficulties. But let’s see if we can improve for the future‘.
As for what improved compared to Friday, Márquez said: ‘We changed the bike setup a lot. One of the good things about having fast Ducati riders in the group is that you analyze, sometimes they analyze and follow in my direction. This time we analyzed where we are, where they are, and we went a bit in that direction. And then I started to feel better. The problem in Q1 was the first attack on the stopwatch with that bike, which was very different. But then, in the race pace, I kept going and continued to understand how to ride that bike because it was a big change. It was too late, because tomorrow I will start from 14th, but the race is long and with the medium rear tire we will see how we can manage’‘.
