Repsol Honda’s Marc Marquez is showing no signs that yesterday’s monster highside is affecting his pace as he topped the third MotoGP free practice session at the Sachsenring by a quarter of a second over Jorge Lorenzo with hometown hero Stefan Bradl putting the LCR Honda in third.
Marquez’s 20th lap of the session was the charm, knocking the German off top spot with a 1’21.581 as Lorenzo took third place at the start of his final run with a 1’21.913 but then hopped into second with a last lap of 1’21.848
Aleix Espargaro’s time from yesterday looked safe at the top of the sheets until ten minutes left to run but the Forward Yamaha man improved himself to sit in fourth with a 1’21.997 while Bradley Smith brushed off his third crash of the weekend to end in fifth.
The Monster Yamaha had a bizarre crash between turns two and three but got his M1 back on the track despite the ‘help’ of the marshals and flew into second place with seven minutes left on a 1’22.001 but he then slipped down the order but it still quicker than Valentino Rossi.
Rossi said yesterday he was struggling with the extra-hard Bridgestone and only had three hard compounds left to work with today. He was mired down in tenth place until the end of the session until he came out on one of the remaining hard tyres and jumped up to sixth.
Dani Pedrosa, whose mechanics were still fixing his broken number one bike at 1am, ended in seventh place while Pol Espargaro added to Yamaha’s crash damage bill when he went down unhurt at turn 11 not long after Broc Parkes did the same, causing Paul Bird’s wallet to clench and wince at the same time.
The Spaniard just stayed ahead of Andrea Iannone, again the quickest Ducati, who finished the session in ninth while Alvaro Bautista was the last of the automatic qualifying two men in tenth.
Andrea Dovizioso, Yonny Hernandez and Cal Crutchlow will all have to go into qualifying one but they are all being chased hard by Scott Redding, who finished as top production Honda, a tenth faster than Nicky Hayden.
Michael Laverty didn’t manage to better his time from yesterday and three-tenths slower but he told bikesportnews.com last night he was working on getting better initial acceleration off the turns to find the couple of tenths he believes is still in the bike.
