Not a perfect day, but Marquez is still happy

After setting the fifth quickest time in Friday's FP1 dry session at Sepang, 0.279 tenths of a second down on title rival Andrea Dovizioso, Repsol Honda rider and current championship leader Marc Marquez made the best of the fully wet track in the afternoon's FP2 session by trying his RC213V rain settings, finishing second fastest just behind the Italian.

“All in all I'm happy with today, as it wasn't perfect but wasn't bad either,” he said. “We had two different weather conditions and in both cases we weren't far from the top, even if we must improve some aspects of the setup as we look to find more rear grip.”

“It's still a bit difficult to understand where we really are in the dry because this morning some riders put on a new tyre in the end, while some others, myself included, did the entire session on the same tyres.”

‘Anyway, even if Dovi was a bit faster than us, we were able to stay there with the top guys. We know this is one of the tracks where we struggle most during the season, but at the moment we'll try and keep working well for the rest of the weekend in order to be ready for Sunday.”

His teammate, Dani Pedrosa started his Malaysian campaign setting the ninth best lap time in the dry, less than half a second off the top, but in the afternoon he struggled to find a good feeling in the wet and closed the session in 18^th place.

Nonetheless, his best effort in the combined free-practice times could put him straight into Q2 if rain should disrupt proceedings in tomorrow's FP3 session.

“This morning we weren't able to do many laps because we had an issue on one of our bikes and had to spend some time in the garage to fix it, as the other one was set for the wet,” he said. “Actually, I was really only able to use the last five minutes of the session. In the afternoon, unfortunately we struggled again to find grip with the rear tyre in the wet.”

“We tried three different tyres with no improvement. It's a bit difficult for us to understand why that was the case, as this situation has also occurred at other tracks in the past.”

“Sometimes I'm able to put heat into the tyres and ride fast, but other times I'm not, even if the conditions are the same. We'll see what the weather conditions are like tomorrow and keep working to try and improve.”