Qualifying report

Bridgestone: Masterful Marquez sets the pace in Sachsenring qualifying

Bridgestone engineers will analyse tyre wear on the CRT-specific soft compound rear slick to see if some riders would be better suited to using the harder, medium compound rear slick for tomorrow’s race.

Repsol Honda’s Marc Marquez grabbed his third pole position of the year courtesy of a blazing lap time of 1’21.311 in an action-packed qualifying session at Sachsenring.

Marc Marquez, Repsol Honda Team

Photo by: Repsol Media

Marquez’s time was a shade off the all-time pole position record set in 2008 on qualifying tyres and rounded out an impressive day for the MotoGP rookie. Second quickest today was Monster Yamaha Tech3’s Cal Crutchlow who narrowly beat Yamaha Factory Racing’s Valentino Rossi to P2 by less than a tenth of a second.

Power Electronics Aspar’s Aleix Espargaro put in an amazing qualifying performance, his lap time of 1'21.887 qualifying him in fifth position – the best ever qualifying result for a CRT rider.

The warm track temperature in the afternoon allowed riders to perform race simulations on slick tyres. The softer rear slick options emerged as the most popular choice among both the works and CRT riders, while front tyre preference was split among the riders between softer and harder front slick.

The soft compound front slick gives extra edge grip – especially important through the infrequent right-hand turns, while the hard compound front slick gives greater stability through the faster sections. As the Sachsenring circuit is such a severe circuit on tyres, Bridgestone engineers will analyse tyre wear on the CRT-specific soft compound rear slick to see if some riders would be better suited to using the harder, medium compound rear slick for tomorrow’s race.

Morning Warm Up is the next MotoGP session at 0955 local time tomorrow (GMT +2) before the thirty lap German Grand Prix gets set to start at 1400.

Shinji Aoki – Manager, Bridgestone Motorsport Tyre Development Department: “This morning track conditions were not the best due to the cool weather and some spots of rain, thankfully we had better conditions in FP4 which allowed the riders to do race simulations on their preferred tyre combination.

The improved track conditions also resulted in a very good being set in qualifying and in particular, the times in QP2 were very quick. It was particularly pleasing to see three CRT riders in QP2 as their class-specific soft option rear slick gave them a big boost in performance at this tight and technical circuit.

As this circuit is so severe on rear tyres and this is the first time we’ve brought a soft compound asymmetric rear slick here, we will analyse the rate of wear of the soft rear slick to see if any CRT riders will be better off using their harder rear slick option.”