With the 13th position in Friday afternoon’s training session, Marc Márquez was relegated to the first qualifying session of the French MotoGP Grand Prix – something that had never happened to him since joining Gresini. And, in part, he feels responsible for it, despite experiencing many difficulties with the bike.
The Spanish rider explained that he is not able to ride as well as on other occasions and that there is a need to work on the less favorable aspects: ‘For example in Jerez test I was riding in a very easy way and I was super good. Here for some reason I’m not finding still the best lines, the correct speed in the layout. I’m just pushing too much and when you don’t see the lap time you are pushing on the points where you feel strong and on that points you are already fast. So now it’s time to work on the weak points and see what we can do’.
At the end of the training session, Márquez did not hide his frustration still on the track, clarifying later: ‘I was not angry, but I was like feeling that frustration on the last tyre because… of course I did one lap just to see and then in the next lap there was a yellow flag and the last one I did a mistake, so I was angry about my mistake because I knew that was the last chance. And that two last laps that were the good ones for me and for the tyre, I couldn’t take the profit’.
Can the data from other Ducati riders help #93 improve? The eight-time world champion believes so: ‘Of course this can help a lot, and this is something that… we have a lot of Ducatis faster than us, so we need to understand where they are, where we are, and try to find the correct balance for me, for my riding style. Maybe we need to go in the direction of some of them’.