Marc Marquez to use past experiences to better set-up

Marc Marquez believes England’s chilly, autumnal temperatures and Silverstone’s bumpy surface were two factors that contributed toward his struggles at achieving optimum set-up on Friday afternoon.

Not that the championship leader is worried. Marquez posted the fifth fastest MotoGP time of the day, and was only marginally slower than title rival Jorge Lorenzo.

Furthermore, the issues he encountered – adapting his Honda RC213V to the bump-laden track and extracting the maximum grip from Michelin’s soft rear tyre – were similar to those Marquez experienced in previous visits to Northamptonshire.

“Always when I arrive here, we know that it’s long and bumpy, but I always had a few problems with the set-up,” said Marquez, who leads Valentino Rossi in the MotoGP standings by a sizeable 53 points.

“The layout is very nice but for the bumps and the cold temperatures this is quite critical. One of the problems that I have with the set-up is trying to absorb the bumps. Every year I have the same problem and every year we go in the same direction, like I said. Tomorrow we’ll try and go in this direction.”

No more than 20 minutes had passed in Friday morning’s free practice session when Marquez found himself skidding through the tarmac run-off on the outside of turn twelve.

Having used Michelin’s medium front tyre at the time, Marquez focussed on the soft for the remainder of the day, wary of suffering a similar episode to FP1.

“This morning I made a small mistake. We started directly with a medium front tyre. We already used that tyre with similar temperatures – or even lower – in the Sachsenring and we thought that it was ready to ride with this.

“It was not like this. I was very slow, it was difficult to get the temperature [into the tyre] and I crash. Again after this I use the soft front tyre, I feel the bike and we start to work. Now we need to analyse and work for tomorrow.”