Marc Márquez finished second in the Sprint race of the Catalan GP in MotoGP, but he had to make a significant recovery to get there. The Gresini rider struggled during qualifying, starting from 14th on the grid.
The eight-time world champion explained how he was able to make such considerable gains between qualifying and the Sprint race: ‘It’s just that with two or three laps on the tyres I feel better, and we need to understand why. In Le Mans I had a bit the same feeling and here one more time. When the tyres are completely new, I’m struggling. I was struggling already in the pre-season, then it looks like I was able to compensate a bit in the first races, but then again now I’m struggling with the new tyres and it’s something that we need to work very deeply because if we start on the first two or three rows is another race. When you start from 14th you are ver penalized on your race strategy. At the moment we are able to save it’.
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: ‘The first two laps my feeling was terrible, and then I felt like I would lose the front in some area. In fact, in the first two laps I was even struggling a bit to follow [Enea] Bastianini, who was in front of me. But then on the third lap I started to feel the potential and I started to attack the others. The most important thing is that if in the race if you struggle for three laps you have 20 laps in front. But I don’t like this feeling, because on the qualifying practice you need to have that potential, because if not you cannot do anything and is there where we need to improve’.
But that’s not the only aspect the rider believes needs improvement, as he stated: ‘It’s true that we need to improve a lot the Fridays, because with today’s lap time I would start from the third row – that it’s still acceptable in a circuit where I struggle. But let’s see if we can improve for the future’.
Regarding what improved compared to Friday, Márquez said: ‘We changed quite a lot the bike set-up. One of the good things of having fast Ducati riders inside the group is that you analyze, sometimes they analyze and they go my direction. This time we analyzed where we are, we analyzed where they are, and we went a bit on that direction. And then I started to feel better. The problem in the Q1 was the first time attack with that bike, that was very different. But then, on the race pace, I kept going and I kept understanding how to ride that bike because it was a big change. It was too late, because tomorrow we’ll start from 14th, but the race is long and with the medium rear tyre we’ll see how we can manage’.