The third challenger
Alex Marquez was a major protagonist of Friday in Aragon. The Gresini team rider not only secured direct access to tomorrow’s Q2, but also finished the Practice session with the second best overall time, just 10 thousandths off the new track record set by Marco Bezzecchi and ahead – by 28 thousandths – of his brother Marc’s time, who is the favorite for this weekend.
“I have been consistent since this morning in FP1 – explained the youngest of the Marquez brothers to Sky Sport MotoGP – but especially in Practice we made a step forward. We did a setup test and tried to improve because I was still struggling a lot, especially to stop the bike and get it into the corner quickly. We still lack something: we lack a lot of grip on the front tire and this is my main problem, because like this I can’t attack the bike much on entry; but we still made a very important step, I felt much better, I was able to do a good race pace with used tires, so I’m happy. But it’s still not enough because for now both Marc and Bezzecchi are a bit ahead of us: we are close, but not yet with them“.
Physical ailments
Alex Marquez then spoke about his physical condition, since he too has gone through many injuries this season: “I’m fine. It’s true that my shoulder still bothers me a bit, but it’s something I’ll have to live with until I remove the plate this winter. The plate is very big because the collarbone is broken in four, so it’s very big and now it doesn’t work very well. But I have to endure. Silverstone was a weekend where we didn’t try to improve our weak points, but we mainly tried to do our own thing. The goal there was to survive with the problems we had. I knew our limits, but I tried to be stronger in other phases and this gave me a boost, from a confidence point of view, very important. Here the grip is very different and I still struggle a bit – concluded Alex Marquez – but if we improve the front feeling, so as to have a bit more grip and not so many lock-ups, we can make an important step forward“.
