Third quickest time in pre-qualifying doesn't tell the whole story of Marc Marquez's day. A place in Q2 is in the bag, but at Motegi the Ducati team's Spaniard struggled more than usual. A few minutes into the session he was outside the 10 and did not show on the track that superiority to which he had accustomed us. Some think that he is also feeling the pressure for the upcoming title.
Marc responded with a laugh, "I'm not nervous at all, the truth is that it was a complicated Friday because I didn't have the sensations I was looking for, or that I demanded," he explained, "I'm not nervous about the title, but when you're not in the situation you want you try to find it as quickly as possible and today we tried to do it too quickly. The feeling in the morning wasn't perfect and in the afternoon it got worse. When we calmed down a little bit, I tried to ride differently at the end of the session and went better. However, lapping with the medium rear I was in the top 4 on pace and that's the most important thing."
On the spot question: would you rather win the title at Motegi with a 4th place or in Indonesia by also winning the race?
"Here with 4th place. When you win the title, on Monday nobody talks about the position you finished the race in. It's very difficult to win title and race, it's true that I have succeeded in the past but because my opponents crashed. You can't ride the same way you always did. 2019 in Thailand? I beat Quartararo, but I was behind him the whole race and I was faster. Here I seem to have a good pace, but it's similar to the others. I prefer to wrap up the championship, no matter what position I finish in. I will do my best as always, but my battle is not to win the race. There are priorities in life, mine is to gain 3 points on Alex, then we will have time to fight in the next GPs (laughs)."
Tell us more about what happened today?
"In the morning I started with the usual bike, but then we tried to find something more than necessary, to solve all the problems at once. This is also experience, and the calmness in the box allowed us, halfway through the session, to return to being calm and go back to the base and finish in a more normal way."
Usually you don't have any of these problems, everything always works well.
"For any rider, if he has a different bike on each exit, it's impossible to concentrate on riding. That's why we didn't change the bike anymore and I decided to work on my riding, to adapt to the problems I had: not to find technical solutions, but at the riding level. We succeeded up to a point, but tomorrow we'll have to work on the details to find more consistency, at the moment that is what I lack."
Where are you at with the solutions?
"Corner entry is the area where I was getting worse, that's the first thing we sorted out. I wasn't feeling good in the middle of the corner either, and we found a solution there as well. Now we have to find it for the exit."
Your brother Alex also struggled, he is in Q1.
"It was a strange day. As for Pecco, in the morning he was flying and in the afternoon he struggled more, the feeling changed. It's true that many riders mounted the soft tyre early and the ranking changed a lot, but it was a strange day. Not to mention that there were a lot of yellow flags at the end of the session, I was lucky to get a lap because in the other two I caught them."
At that moment you were outside the Top 10.
"I noticed that, that's why I came out of the pits right away for the second attempt. I wanted to be among the first to avoid the yellow flags."
How come so many crashes?
"Because the feeling was very strange, although the grip is not that bad, this caused a lot of crashes, maybe it's the Friday where there were more. In the afternoon it was warmer, but the track was slippery and it was also windy."