Sixth and seventh places on the grid for the Repsol Honda Team in Misano

The Repsol Honda Team pairing of Pol Espargaro and Marc Marquez split 0.012 seconds as dry weather returned to Misano and Marquez walked away from two falls.

Friday’s rain showers were nowhere to be seen as the sun set at the San Marino Grand Prix. The drivers wanted to use Free Practice 3 to improve their previous times. The MotoGP field tightened over the course of the day as the premier class got the maximum performance out of their machines.

Pol Espargaro got down to work in Free Practice 3, the # 44 was determined to end the morning session in the top ten after his positive feelings on Friday in the dry. A constant session of constant improvement resulted in Espargaro accomplishing just that, lapping the Misano circuit in 1: 32.416. Free practice 4 was used by Espargaro and his team to experiment and collect useful data for the future before the race on Sunday. Then Espargaro left his run too late in Q2 and secured sixth place on the grid with his last lap of the session. He improved his FP3 time by another half a second for the second row of the grid. This is now Espargaro’s third consecutive top ten result in qualifying.

An important session of Free Practice 3 began for Marc Marquez when he started the day’s work and built up his pace throughout the session. Unfortunately, Marquez crashed at Turn 14 in the final minutes of free practice, although he couldn’t improve his time, and went into Q1. The eight-time world champion did everything he had to do in the first 15-minute session and headed into Q2 to join his teammate from the Repsol Honda team. With a tentative fourth place in his pocket after his first run of the second session, Marquez went in search of more on his final run, but suffered a second crash, this time at Turn 9. Again uninjured, Marquez starts at the front of the third row in seventh. Despite the falls, Marquez is happy with his progress on Saturday.

The San Marino Grand Prix on Sunday starts at 2:00 p.m. local time and the race lasts 27 laps. Before that, the Repsol Honda Team has a 20-minute morning warm-up to confirm their attitudes for the race, with the weather still looming as a question mark.