Marquez: Best time on Bradl bike during day of 'concepts'

Spanish MotoGP winner Marc Marquez spent Monday's official test working on future 'concepts' for the Honda RC213V.

That included two runs on Stefan Bradl's HRC test bike, featuring a carbon-fibre reinforced frame, with which he set his best lap time of the day before switching back to his race machine.

"I did my best lap time with Bradl’s bike," said Marquez, who completed 75 laps, equal to three race distances, of the Jerez circuit.

"It was another bike and I just did one run with used tyres and another run with new tyres. It was positive because we understand many things and it was just to give the first comments to HRC."

Marquez dodged details on exactly how the Bradl bike was different, saying only:

"It was different. I mean some positives, some negatives. But my comments were exactly the same as Bradl’s comments. This is the most important because he will keep testing and trying new items and it's important that you have the same comments and feeling as the test rider.

"We working a little bit on the front confidence of course and, yeah, you gain some things and lose some other things. Racing is always a compromise. The perfect bike doesn't exist, so we just tried to find the best compromise.

"Then I swapped to my bike because it's the one that we have now.

"We just work on the concept of a few things, we don’t work on the details of the set-up, and it was an important test, we did many laps. But when all the new items were finished I just stopped because the feeling was good with the bike and sometimes it's better to stop there and keep like this."

Engine-braking was among the areas of work for Marquez with the current bike, after memorably being caught out while leading in Austin.

" On my current bike I was working a lot on corner entry," he explained. "In that area of the engine brake, that is where we had more problems during the first three races.

"Here we, I said already, we improved a lot. But still they were some weak points, so we worked there. We found something that was interesting and then just other concept things for the future."

Second fastest when he halted testing with an hour remaining, late flying laps subsequently pushed the #93 down to seventh on the final test timesheets.

Team-mate Jorge Lorenzo, who suffered a fall, set the ninth fastest lap time.