GREAT BATTLE WITH ROSSI IN ASSEN

Repsol Honda’s Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa have experienced another strange race weekend in Assen at the Dutch TT. Qualifying 3rd and 4th on the grid for today’s 26 lap race, both riders showed strong pace throughout the practice sessions. However, in this morning’s warmup session, Dani suffered a high speed crash in turn nine, resulting in a trip to the medical centre and his mechanics with a heavy workload to prepare the bike in time.

Fortunately, Dani escaped serious injury and suffered from heavy contusions to his left thumb and middle finger forcing him to take painkillers prior to the race.

Marc had a good start to the race moving up to 2nd place behind Valentino Rossi on the first lap, but Dani had an issue with his clutch creating too much spin at the start and costing him valuable seconds, resulting in him dropping back to 13th. He soon realised that there was a problem with the brakes which proved costly as he tried to pass riders to move into the podium battle.

Dani climbed up to 8th by lap thirteen and entered a battle with Bradley Smith and Pol Espargaro. Marc, who had been tracing Valentino for nineteen laps – recording a new fastest lap record on lap four of 1’33.617 (Beating Dani’s 2012 time of 1’34.548) – made his move with seven laps remaining, taking the lead. With just three laps to go, a small mistake in the last chicane allowed Rossi to pass Marc and try to open up a gap. Marc showed true character and recovered four tenths of a second in the last lap to Valentino and made his move into the last chicane on the final lap. The two riders touched briefly but Valentino was able to pick the bike up, riding through the gravel trap, beating Marc to the finish line.

Meanwhile, Dani got pushed wide at the same chicane by Pol Espargaro and Cal Crutchlow and was demoted to 8th after briefly running in 6th.

After the official post-race press conference, Marc and Valentino were called into race direction for a rider hearing and to review the video footage. It was agreed this was a racing incident and no appeal has been lodged.

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FRUSTRATION FOR MARQUEZ AFTER CRASHING OUT ON THIRD LAP

It was a day of mixed fortunes for the Repsol Honda Team, with Dani Pedrosa claiming his first podium of the season and reigning World Champion Marc Marquez crashing out of the Catalunya GP, from second place.

Marc had a great start from 4th and found himself in 2nd by the end of the first lap, with Dani losing out from 6th on the grid and dropping down to 10th. Marc was desperate not to let pole-man Jorge Lorenzo breakaway and set the fastest race lap on lap two whilst chasing him as Dani began to find his rhythm. However, on lap three Marc made an error in turn ten, running wide and found himself in the gravel trap unable to stop. He was brought down into the stones and the gear shifter was damaged, as a result ending his race.

Meanwhile Dani continued to progress through the pack and by lap five he was in 5th place. The following lap Dovizioso crashed out and promoted Dani to 4th and then on lap seven, Dani passed Aleix Espargargo into 3rd place, which is where he remained for the rest of the race. Dani has now finished on the podium in Catalunya seven times in the last eight years.

After seven rounds of the 2015 season, Marc remains 5th in the Championship on 69 points (69 points behind leader Rossi), with Dani in 10th on 39 points.

The team will be back on track tomorrow for a post-race test, before heading to Assen in two weeks time

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WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2015

To mark this year’s World Environment Day, FIM Environmental Ambassador Marc Márquez, World MotoGP champion, and his brother Alex Márquez, World Champion in Moto2, are joining in the celebrations and, in coordination with Dorna, official Promoter of Moto GP, the FIM International Environment Commission (CIE) is presenting an awareness-raising video reflecting the official theme of the 2015 WED, “consume responsibly”. In addition to this type of campaign, the FIM applies a strict body of environmental regulations and implements various actions and initiatives including environmental management plans in press rooms and the paddock, programmes for the organisation of sustainable events and environmental education programmes.

Along with Marc Márquez and Valentino Rossi, their fellow FIM Environmental Ambassadors Laia Sanz, Alex Salvini, Takahisa Fujinami and Greg Hancock will also be celebrating World Environment Day.

Next week, the Barcelona-Cataluña Circuit will be organising the second KiSS Barcelona event focusing on sustainable mobility and other environmental initiatives.

World environment day (wed) is an annual event and the biggest and most widely celebrated day for positive environmental action worldwide. World environment day activities take place all year round but peak on 5 June every year, involving everyone from everywhere.

Marc Márquez, FIM Environmental Ambassador: It is very important to support these campaigns. For my brother and me, it was a pleasure to contribute to these celebrations of World Environment Day, as we all have dreams to fulfil, and one of these dreams is to practise sport responsibly and to live in a better world. We only have one planet and we have to take care of it!  

Kattia Hernandez CIE Director: We are part of these 7 billon dreams, and if we all attend to some small details we can make a big difference.  This is a call to all the members of our sporting community to join forces and, through the values at the heart of sport, let us take action to preserve our home, our planet.

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