Repsol Honda riders Dani Pedrosa and Marc Marquez, plus LCR’s Stefan Bradl concluded the final day of private testing at the Circuit of the Americas with Marquez having lead the top of the timesheets all three days, and now is already tipped to win the Austin round as he was virtually unstoppable with his particular riding style, physics defying lean angles and speed, and if he can keep it up he’ll become a true and worthy heir to Casey Stoner.
Check out what all three Honda riders to say regarding the final day of testing, and the last official pre-season test will be at Jerez de la Frontera from March 23rd to the 25th.
Marc Marquez said, “This final day has been good for me.
From the beginning I had the same feeling as yesterday and especially this morning we started to try some technical settings for the first time and we found some big improvements.
After lunch we were considering a race simulation but in the end we spent the time working with the electronics.
It’s been important to come and test here as we will be here for the second race.
It’s quite a physical track -especially the first sector- but in the end, we now know the track a little and we have a good base for when we come here for the GP.
”“After the first exit this morning I had a pain in my neck, I’m not sure what caused it but it affected my riding so I decided not to do so many laps today.
Everything has gone well though in general, we had three positive days and I’m happy we came here, because we were able to put in many laps of this circuit which is very tricky and difficult.
There are some heavy braking points and some blind corners, so it was important to test here to find the references.
We weren’t able to try much in terms of settings, because we didn’t know the track and the surface wasn’t 100% with so few riders here, but we’ve been improving.
We only tried the soft compound tyre, but in general the feeling is positive.
I’d like to thank Honda for making the effort to come here, it has been valuable and I am very grateful!” said Pedrosa.
“Overnight my left hand started to ache and this morning it was oddly swollen.
For this reason I was not able to be very aggressive on the bike (especially on hard breakings and left corners) and we decided to cancel the afternoon race simulation.
However we improved some areas like the breaking stability and we tried different hard tyres both rear and front gathering more data for the race weekend.
Overall it was a useful test for us because we had the first approach with this new track and we gained more track time before the start of the season”, commented Stefan Bradl.