Yamaha’s Maverick Vinales ended a busy first MotoGP practice session at Termas de Rio Hondo top of the pile with a two-tenth margin.
Not only did the teams and riders have their own programmes to get through this morning, they also had mandatory laps to do for Michelin.
As the French tyre manufacturer doesn’t have much data on the hard rear in Argentina, the riders have been asked to complete five flying laps in FP1 or FP2 to provide feedback. Failure to do so will result in a six-place grid penalty for Sunday’s 25-lap race.
Vinales was one of a handful of riders to get their hard tyre run out of the way early, and worryingly for the rest he was on ominous form. The Qatar race winner managed a 1m40.356s towards the end of FP1, which put him half a second clear.
Pramac Racing’s Danilo Petrucci cut that to just over two tenths, but the Italian was riding with the soft front and rear combination on his Ducati GP17. Tech 3’s Johann Zarco completed the top three, 0.218s down, with team-mate Jonas Folger a further 0.086s behind in fourth.
Impressively, Karel Abraham was fifth fastest on the two-year-old GP15 and just over three tenths off the pace. With so many different tyre combinations in use times aren’t totally representative. However, rather encouragingly, the Aspar rider put in his 1m40.676s on the medium rear.
Suzuki’s Andrea Iannone guided his GSX-RR to sixth on the timesheets ahead of former team-mate Andrea Dovizioso. Hector Barbera’s broken collarbone has almost fully healed and the Spaniard is feeling much more confident of a strong result this weekend.
Twitter: First crash of the weekend is @marcmarquez93 – he’s up & headed back to the pits!
#ArgentinaGP https://t.co/w9MGXEJO4N (@MotoGP)
The Avintia rider was eighth in FP1, with Marc VDS’ Jack Miller and Aspar’s Alvaro Bautista rounding out the top 10. Marc Marquez, who crashed halfway through the session, was 11th, whilst Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo were 15th and 16th respectively.
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