Marc Marquez & Dani Pedrosa 1st & 2nd in opening practice at Qatar

After nearly two months of preseason and many miles undertaken in testing, Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa have again donned their leathers for the first practice session for the inaugural round of the 2015 MotoGP World Championship: The Qatar Grand Prix. Under the floodlights of the Losail Circuit, the Repsol Honda Team riders began the campaign in the best possible way –taking the top two positions on the timesheets for the only premier class session of the night.

From the opening minute they were frontrunners. On the third lap of the 15 he put in today, Pedrosa set a time of 1:55.357 and, just a few minutes later, Marquez took another 76 thousandths of a second off that lap. The World Champion stopped the clock at 1:55.281, on his fifth of 15 laps. That gave him the top spot, which he did not relinquish for the rest of the session.

The next two practice sessions for this atypical night Grand Prix night in Qatar will take place tomorrow.

Marc Marquez
“Today went pretty well. It is always important to make a good start to the weekend. I felt good and the feeling was similar to that which we had in pre-season testing, although maybe there was a little less grip. We tried some things that we had prepared after the test and this went well. Tomorrow we will try to keep progressing, but we can’t forget that the track surface here will improve a lot and the times will come down.”

Dani Pedrosa
“We have completed the first session of the year and we have done quite well. Now we are going to work on the bike to get ready for the coming days. We need to keep taking steps forward as the weekend goes on and keep improving our pace. The track was in quite good condition and we’ll see how it evolves over the course of the Grand Prix weekend.”

Source: Repsol Media