Takes pole position

After qualifying, Marquez takes pole position, with a time of 1h39.411. He is unable to improve on his fastest lap time due to a late crash at Turn 1, a heavy fall resulting in no serious injuries. Due to a failure on Scott Redding’s tire, Michelin has decided to withdraw both rear tyres on safety grounds, and introduce the extra “special” rear compound brought for such an occasion. Each rider will have four of these rear tyres for Sunday.

I’m happy with how the bike is going and with the pace we have. We know what my crashes today were due to; the first was down to changing the setup but the second was because we pushed too hard. That is what happens in the qualifying session. Tomorrow we’ll give everything we have in the race…After this decision from Michelin, I think that tomorrow will be a bit of an unknown because everyone will have a different tyre spec from what we’ve used for the whole weekend. We’ll wait and see how it works. We’ll have two warm-up sessions, one of 30 minutes and the other 20, to gather information, and we’ll have to see if everything goes well. Let’s hope there won’t be too many differences from the tyres we’ve been using so far.