Pol Espargaro completed the most laps in Sachsenring afternoon practice

Pol Espargaro kicked off his German GP campaign by finishing the opening day of action in Saxony in 11th. The young Spaniard jumped into action when the first session commenced as clouds hovered above the undulating circuit and he completed 8 laps before the rain began to fall, and thus, he concluded the practice in 6th. In the afternoon, he carried on from where he left off and the rain did not return as he powered onwards whilst continuing his set-up work in preparation for Sunday’s race. He eventually completed 24 laps, which was more than any other MotoGP rider and his fastest time was set on the 18th lap, that puts him less than half of a second back from the top five. The 2013 Moto2 World Champion will look to take another step forward tomorrow and clinch a solid grid position for the 9th round of the 2016 MotoGP World Championship.

Pol Espargaro – Position: 11th – Time: 1’23.400 – Laps: 32
“The weather has clearly influenced the opening day here in Germany, because neither myself, Michelin nor anybody else expected Germany to be like this in July. Therefore, I suffered but especially with the front. Altogether I would say, that the compounds that we have available seem to be a bit too hard, and it’s not at all easy to bring them up to the right temperature. Anyway, we were able to get out on track and try a few setup solutions, but we can say now that the bike is working well overall so I’m confident for the rest of the weekend. I believe that today’s results can’t be taken into account too much as a lot of riders changed tyres at the end of the session, and we didn’t do this, but nevertheless I am sure that we can make a big improvement on new rubber. We decided to finish on the same compounds that we used all day in order to have a higher number left for FP3 and the qualifying session because the allocation here is quite tight. Now we look forward to better weather for tomorrow.”

Source – Tech3