MotoGP Qatar Free Practice 1 Results

The season-opening night practice at the Losail circuit provided a number of surprises, the biggest being NGM Forward Racing's Aleix Espargaro—on what is supposed to be one of the "slower" Open class bikes (although the Forward Racing Yamaha is basically a factory M1 with just the spec software)—topping the leaderboard over GO&FUN Honda Gresini's Alvaro Bautista and Monster Yamaha Tech 3's Bradley Smith, both riding Factory satellite machines. Where were the main Factory class riders who are expected to be battling for the championship? Repsol Honda's Dani Pedrosa was the first of the "alien" quartet in 6th spot, followed by Movistar Yamaha Racing's Valentino Rossi in 7th. A very unhappy Jorge Lorenzo on the second Movistar Yamaha was languishing in 9th, while reigning World Champion Marc Marquez—still recovering from a broken leg suffered in training several weeks ago—sits in 11th.

It’s likely that the main reason for the poor showing by the Factory quartet was a combination of factors. First, the factory teams of Repsol Honda, Movistar Yamaha, and Ducati weren’t present at the pre-season test held at Losail a little over a week ago, giving the non-factory teams a major advantage in setup. Also, even though the Moto3 and Moto2 classes had run prior, there was still a lot of dust and sand on the track surface, so it’s likely that Pedrosa, Rossi, Lorenzo, and Marquez weren’t pushing very hard. The session was also red-flagged midway through its 50-minute length to clean up gravel and dust thrown onto the track from a crash by Yonny Hernandez.

Next MotoGP FP2 practice session begins tomorrow at 8:00am PST.