Valencia MotoGP: Marquez leads Espargaro in wet warm-up

Reigning MotoGP champion Marc Marquez bounced back from his crash-affected qualifying by dominating a wet warm-up in Valencia, setting the pace by 0.805s.

Marquez first took the lead with a 1m44.042s eight minutes into the session and gradually lowered the benchmark to end up with a 1m40.154s at the top of the timing screens.

For much of the session, his closest challengers were Valentino Rossi and the Pramac duo of Jack Miller and Danilo Petrucci, but Aleix Espargaro jumped up to second as the chequered flag fell.

The Aprilia rider beat Rossi by one and a half tenths with Petrucci and Miller completing the top five.

Ducati factory rider Andrea Dovizioso was over 1.4s slower than Marquez in sixth and could only beat Marc VDS Honda’s Franco Morbidelli and KTM’s Pol Espargaro by 10 and 17 thousandths of a second respectively.

Espargaro and his teammate Bradley Smith both spent most of the session within the top 10, the Briton ending up right behind his teammate ninth.

Suzuki’s Andrea Iannone lost the first half of the session with an early crash at Turn 12 but recovered to 10th.

He led pole-sitter Maverick Vinales, his teammate Alex Rins and Dani Pedrosa, who ended his last warm-up as a Honda factory rider in 13th.

Johann Zarco could only take 16th while Jorge Lorenzo was 21st, 2.620s off the pace.

Warm-up results

























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