Pedrosa very, very fast in FP1 at Motorland

This weekend, the MotoGP battle comes to Aragón. It is a weekend full of news and rumours that never stop in the premier class.

The fastest in the first free practice session has been Dani Pedrosa, who set a time of 1:50.281, with Jorge Lorenzo right behind him at 1:50.730.

Dani completed seventeen laps, of which only twelve were complete, enough to be the rider who has posted the most 1:50s, doing so three times. In the second sector he does something that the rest of the riders either can’t or don’t know how to do, and he is gaining just over 200 thousandths on the rest of the field.

Stoner started out dominating the practice during the first few minutes, but in the end he finished in third place. The Australian rider quickly reached the limit of what he achieved in today’s session and was unable to improve by much.

One of the surprises has been seeing the aluminium chassis on Valentino Rossi’s bike. For now the results have not been good, as he finished behind his teammate Hayden, who has the carbon one. It is clear that one cannot expect everything to go well on the first chassis that is built, and if not, just ask Honda about the whole 800 era. Looking back, they have only managed to produce a chassis that makes the bike stable this year.

Another surprise has been seeing Randy De Puniet, who with the Ducati satellite bike has placed sixth, ahead of the factory riders and of the other satellite teams too. It is an even bigger surprise when we see that he was the third-fastest rider through the T4 of the circuit.

Bautista will have to set up the bike to keep up the pace achieved in the last few races, and it won’t be easy. At Suzuki they always need to start on the soft tyre because of their well-known problems getting temperature into the tyres, but at Motorland the soft tyre doesn’t last many laps, and the temperature is still not what it will be under race conditions.

As for Toni Elías, there is more talk about his possible move to Superbikes after testing the BMW than about his results, but we want to see him at the front wherever he is, and now he is in Aragón, so we are sure he will give everything for this race.

Statements from Ramón Forcada:

It’s clear that the differences between Honda and Yamaha are not as big as has been said all season. The bikes are very similar. Despite everything, the times are somewhat misleading because we arrived here with a very dirty track.

The soft tyre will be one of the keys. We probably won’t be able to use it, since in a few laps it ends up destroyed.

Jorge has now been testing the hard tyre, so we will talk with him to see what conclusions he draws.

Our bike is not worse in the fast areas and better in the tight corners. Simply, our setting is better for those areas, but it is something we need to change a lot for the race.

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