Reigning MotoGP World Champion said he found a big setup improvement at the Qatar MotoGP test yesterday and ended four-tenths behind leader Alex Rins.

The Repsol Honda man, who is still recovering from shoulder surgery, found both single-lap and used tyre pace with his RC213V and was also able to put in 57 laps without huge discomfort.

“Yeah I’m happy because first of all it’s the first day I did a lot of laps, with my condition I feel quite good," said Marquez, speaking at the track.

“Of course now it’s a little bit painful but this is normal, it still remains two weeks. But yeah apart from that we made a big step on the setup of the bike and on the feeling, now on the rhythm I’m closer to the top guys,”

“I’m not the fastest one but we need to understand where we are, that is Qatar. At Qatar we struggle a little bit but we are getting closer and closer and this is the most important thing.”

“Today we test a lot of things. First of all we concentrated on the setup of the bike because yesterday we were out, we were far. And we did a big step there, since I found a good feeling on the bike and I was riding in a good way, then we started to try many many different things.

"One of the things you can see if the fairing, the aerodynamic package and yeah, we concentrated on many different areas and tomorrow I think we can still do another step.”