MotoGP news

Repsol Honda celebrates strong qualifying

Repsol Honda riders Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden put in storming performances during this afternoon's French qualifying session, Pedrosa taking pole position and Hayden snatching a second-row start. 

"I'm very satisfied with today's result," said Pedrosa. "It's my first pole position of the season and that's especially good at this track because it's very important to have a good grid position here. Today we made some small chassis adjustments, fine-tuning the machine. This afternoon I wasn't able to get the maximum out of my first two Michelin qualifying tyres, so we made some more changes to the chassis settings and that allowed me to make a big step forward with my third qualifier. I didn't expect to get pole with my fourth qualifying tyre but I did, so we're very happy. As far as race pace goes, I'm quite satisfied but there are a lot of strong riders going very fast here and the lap times are all very close, so I hope we can make another step forward for tomorrow. The other question mark is the weather. It's been very changeable and we still don't know what to expect for the race."

Nicky Hayden commented, "It definitely hasn't been an easy day or an easy weekend. We haven't really found a direction even though we've been trying a lot of things. This afternoon I think we made a bit of progress and got a better feeling as time went on, so I was able to put one down later on and get a respectable grid position. But I really need to come up with something for tomorrow if I don't want to watch them guys completely disappear in the race. It's going to be hard. Getting into the corners has been the issue, then when we get the front better we hurt the rear, so it's been a constant compromise all weekend. We've been making a little bit bigger changes than we would usually make during a race weekend but sometimes that has to be done. We'll definitely try another little something in warm-up. We've got a lot of work to do tonight, but these boys aren't scared of a little hard work."

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