Since taking his first pole position and victory combination in 2010, Marc Marquez (Repsol Honda Team) has made the Sachsenring his own. His domination of the circuit continued as he set a 1’21.160 in Q2 to claim pole position by 0.412s. This is the seventh pole in a row in Germany and the 62nd pole of his career, having made 137 starts in total. Despite Honda’s historically strong record at the Sachsenring, it seems that in 2016 it is Marquez making the difference as his teammate, Dani Pedrosa (Repsol Honda Team) was 10th in Q2 and 0.732s slower. Weather remains an unknown for the race, rain would certainly help other riders close in on Marquez. As in Assen, Marquez has a great opportunity to extend his championship lead as his closest rival, Jorge Lorenzo (Movistar Yamaha MotoGP), is starting 11th. During the day Marquez also tested a revised chassis, but seemed to prefer the one he used in Assen.
Marc Marquez: “I’m happy to have set the fastest time today, because we’re better here than at other circuits. I have a fairly good pace and am riding comfortably. The final free-practice session wasn’t one of the best of the weekend, as I didn’t feel completely right but we made a change for the qualifying session, which went much better. We need to study the data this afternoon, but in qualifying we managed to take that step forward that we needed. We'll see what happens tomorrow, because the weather forecast is for conditions to be quite unstable. In any case, we’ll try to finish on the podium, which is our goal. It seems that Valentino [Rossi] is very strong, and we’ll also have to keep Dani [Pedrosa] in mind; I don’t know what happened to him in qualifying, but his pace is very close to ours and he’s very strong here.”