Positive first day of work for Marquez and Pedrosa at Le Mans
Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa started working on the setup of their RC213V on the French GP’s opening day, which took place in fine albeit a bit cool weather conditions, with max air and ground temperatures of 22° and 27° C, respectively.
Marquez set the third-fastest time both in the morning and the afternoon sessions while working on electronics and on the general setup of the bike, looking to improve his pace on the first and third sectors of the track.
Pedrosa had a very positive start to the day, clocking the fastest time in FP1. He also started the afternoon session quite strong, breaking trough the 1’34” barrier in his first run before trying some setup changes that didn’t help him to make an additional step forward as he had hoped.
Both riders tried the new rear tyre that Michelin brought and look forward to continuing their work on it, beginning with tomorrow’s FP3 session at 9:55 a.m. local time.
Marc Marquez
“Today was demanding. We knew this circuit would cause us to struggle a bit, but we’re overcoming things fairly well. I have a good pace and I’m feeling good, although we’re losing some time on both of this circuit’s hard acceleration points; it’s something that’s difficult to recover from afterwards. We’re working on this aspect and we’ll see if we can take another step forward tomorrow, both with the electronics and with the setup of the bike. It will also be important to make a good decision about which tyres we’ll use on Sunday, although it seems that both of the compounds we have available are pretty good.”
Dani Pedrosa
“We started the day well, but in the end we didn’t finish off as we had hoped. The start of the second session also went well, but after that we were evaluating some technical changes that didn’t give us the results we wanted, and made me lose pace. We won’t make many changes to the bike’s setup tomorrow, in order to try to concentrate on my riding and on improving the pace for both the race and qualifying.”
Results Session
| Pos. | Rider | Num | Nation | Team | Constructor | Time/Gap |
|---|
Location Information
Built in 1965 around the existing 24-Hour track, the Le Mans Bugatti Grand Prix race circuit lies 5km south of the city of Le Mans and 200km south-west of Paris. The venue has hosted Grand Prix since the late sixties but a serious accident to Spanish rider Alberto Puig in… read more.
| Length | 4.185 kilometres / 2.6 miles |
| Width | 13 metres |
| Left corners | 5 |
| Right corners | 9 |
| Longest straight | 0.674 kilometres / 0.419 miles |
| Constructed | 1966 |
| Modified | 2008 |
| Resurfacing | Resurfaced before 2017 round |
Automobile Club de l'Ouest, Le Mans, France - View in Google Maps
Records
| Pole Position | 1m 30.450s (166.5km/h) Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati, 2022) |
| Race Lap | 1m 31.778s (164.1km/h) Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati, 2022) |
| Race Time | 41m 34.613s (163 km/h) Enea Bastianini (Ducati, 2022) |
| 2023 Race Winner | Marco Bezzecchi (Ducati) |
| 2023 Sprint Winner | Jorge Martin (Ducat) |
