Ajo Motorsport rider closes first day of Free Practice for Aragon Grand Prix in eighth, see less than 5 tenths off the top time.

Johann Zarco started the fourteenth round of the Moto2 World Championship with a good feeling in at MotorLand Aragon. The French rider finished eighth on Friday, shop less than half a second off the fastest time of a day in which he focused mostly on setup and race pace.

As at recent GPs, price Zarco went out looking to go fastest from the early stages of FP1. He succeeded, leading the timesheet in the first quarter hour. After a stop in the box to switch to hard tyres, the Frenchman looked for a steady pace until the end of the session, in which he finished sixth with a time of 1:54.486.

In the afternoon the Moto2 World Championship leader worked on the setup of his Kalex, gradually improving with each runout. In his penultimate lap and with heavily worn tyres, Zarco was able to give his best lap of the day -1:54.164- improving on his morning top lap and ending up eighth overall. He was less than 5 tenths of a second off the head of the timesheets.

The Ajo Motorsport rider will tomorrow try to take another front row start at MotorLand Aragon, repeating his success from the previous two seasons, when qualifying gets underway from 3:05pm.

Results (Combined practice time FP1-FP2)
1. Takaaki Nakagami (Kalex) 1:53.702
2. Sam Lowes (Kalex) 1:53.787 +0.085
3. Thomas Luthi (Kalex) 1:53.793 +0.091
4. Jonas Folger (Kalex) 1:53.898 +0.196
5. Lorenzo Baldassarri (Kalex) 1:53.953 +0.251
8. Johann Zarco (Ajo Motorsport) 1:54.164 +0.462
24. Tetsuta Nagashima (Ajo Motorsport Academy) 1:55.327 +1.687

5 JOHANN ZARCO

“Today has been a good day. We started well in the morning, going fast from the beginning, and we worked with a good pace throughout the day. We tried different tyres, and although we all opted for just one of the compounds, personally I think that although used tyres are better, we still have to improve our pace a little. We will have to learn how to manage the soft tyre well for qualifying and to achieve a good pace. I feel I can go faster but we have to work well, prepare the bike as best we can and be relaxed on track. At the moment the sector where we are losing the most time is Section 2, so we have to analyse why that is and try to improve, but overall we have to try more things with the bike. We will do that tomorrow.”