Marquez: “Things are a bit tough!”

Marquez: “Things are a bit tough!”

Marc Marquez admits he is struggling on corner exit as he ended the first day of the Qatar Test in tenth, over a second off the pace.

Marquez headed out at half past five, and ended his work with one hour to go in the session, when temperatures began dropping fast and the tarmac got greasier from the humidity.

The double MotoGP World Champion struggled more than expected to find a good setup for the Losail track and, together with his crew, has planned some major setup changes for Thursday. Marquez is aiming to improve his RC213V in turning and corner exit, plus will focus on tweaking his chassis setup.

The Spaniard set his best time of 1’56.910 on lap 29 of 45, leaving him to end the day in tenth, 1.071s off the pace of Jorge Lorenzo at the top of the timesheets.

The second day of the Qatar Test gets underway at 16:00 Local Time on Thursday.

Marquez said: “We knew before coming to Qatar that this circuit is one of the toughest on the calendar for us, and this year we are finding things a bit tough on the kind of corners that you encounter here. We are far from where we’d like to be, but the positive thing is that this is still only testing. Even though in Australia things went very well, here we have the opportunity to try many different things. In the remaining days, we will try some more things out to understand which direction we need to go to improve. We have been working a little on everything and where I feel best is when braking and entering the corners. We have work to do on cornering and on corner exits, because that is where we are losing a lot of time and at a circuit like this it makes it very hard on the straights.”