Jorge Martin doesn’t want to interrupt his magical moment. It matters little if the world championship leader was the only one to mount a soft tire on the rear in the final part, but he started the weekend of the Catalan Grand Prix by placing his Ducati in front of everyone.
The Prima Pramac Racing rider stopped the clock with a time of 1’39″579, just under a second away from the Barcelona track record, and preceded by 292 thousandths a Marc Marquez who instead paid attention above all to working on the race pace with his Gresini Racing GP23, given that he took his medium rear tire to cover 19 laps, almost the race distance, showing a truly enviable pace.
In third and fourth position there is a KTM tandem made up of Brad Binder and Pedro Acosta, who finished three tenths from the top, separated from each other by a handful of thousandths. Both fitted a new medium tire on their RC16 for the final run, with which they achieved their performance, after the rookie had previously also been the protagonist of a long run in the gravel of Turn 7.
New medium tire at the end also for the host Aleix Espargaro, star of last year’s GP with a double with his Aprilia, who one day after announcing his retirement at the end of the season placed himself in fifth place, 472 adrift thousandths. The Spaniard also wears a celebratory helmet, which reminds us that he grew up in Granollers, a stone’s throw from the racetrack.
The gap opens further to find the other two Ducatis of Alex Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia, who like Marc worked with the same tires until the end of the session. For both, however, it must be underlined that the gap compared to #93 is quite heavy in equal conditions, because it is around half a second per lap. In the final laps the difference in pace between the eight-time world champion and the reigning champion was more or less three tenths.
The morning was very positive for the KTMs, because all four were in the top nine positions, with Augusto Fernandez and Jack Miller occupying eighth and ninth place, ahead of Raul Fernandez’s Trackhouse Racing Aprilia and the RS – Official GP of a Maverick Vinales so far more in the shadows than one might have expected.
You have to go down to 13th place to find the first of the Hondas, which is that of Johann Zarco. For the Frenchman, the LCR team has approved the new aerodynamic package tested in last week’s test at Mugello (the exhaust is also new) and seems to have given positive responses, given that his gap from the top is less than a second. At Honda there is also a step forward for Luca Marini, who finally moved away from the bottom of the standings, finishing 17th.
Slightly ahead of him are the two Yamahas of Fabio Quartararo and Alex Rins, who in turn brought the new aerodynamics of the M1 to its debut in a race weekend. “El Diablo” also had to deal with a warning on the dashboard which forced him to change bikes, but in the end he managed to stay within a second of Martin’s best time.
However, it was not an easy session for several Ducatisti. It is true that they all continued on the same tires until the end, but it is surprising to see Fabio Di Giannantonio 14th, but above all Enea Bastianini 19th, Franco Morbidelli 21st and Marco Bezzecchi 22nd, even if it must be said that the latter had an electronics problem that forced him to use his second Pertamina Enduro VR46 GP23 for the entire session.
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