After two positive and calm sessions for Marc Márquez on Friday and Saturday, in the warm up on Sunday we experienced the first scare of the course for the multi-champion.
With almost 12 minutes of practice remaining, and while Márquez was looking to move up from 18th place, the #93 crashed at turn 10 of the Losail circuit, on the left, when he started to open the throttle. The rider rolled along the asphalt loopholes in front of the bike, which he did not let go of at any time, and managed to stop it when it reached the gravel, where he put it on its feet to continue on.
Video: Marc Márquez’s fall in the warm up of the 2022 Qatar GP
(click on the link if you don’t see the video below)
The Catalan from Repsol was able to complete the morning session, where he completed 10 laps and finished eleventh with a best time of 1:55.068, half a second behind Enea Bastianini.
In 2021, Honda riders were involved in 26% of crashes in the MotoGP season. Márquez went down 22 times throughout the past year despite missing four races, and between him and Pol Espargaró they added 42 accidents. Also, counting Alex Márquez (19 crashes), Takaaki Nakagami (12) and Stefan Bradl (2 in races as a substitute for Márquez), the Honda riders accumulated no less than 75 crashes.
In the case of Márquez, after a chaotic year 2021 in which he admitted that he even thought about withdrawing, any fall sets off certain alarms in a World Cup in which he hopes to return to 100% and aspire to everything for the first time since 2019 .
Furthermore, in an intense warm up before this afternoon’s exciting race at Losail, Márquez’s teammate, Pol Espargaró, dressed up in the #93 with a great save at turn 6 on the Qatar track.
Márquez will start from the front row of the grid after qualifying on Saturday, third, while Pol Espargaró will start from second, sixth, both from the same part of the track.
