Marc Márquez takes the MotoGP pole in Valencia, with Zarco 2nd and Iannone 3rd

The MotoGP World Championship has held its final battle for pole position at the Valencia Circuit, at the season-ending 2017 Grand Prix, in which Marc Márquez and Andrea Dovizioso are fighting for the premier-class title.

First we saw the riders who had failed to make the top 10 of the combined free practice sessions held between Friday and Saturday morning come out, watching as the Espargaró brothers were the best and got into Q2 to fight for the top 12 on the grid. Meanwhile, the positions from 13th onwards were completed with Viñales 13th, Tito 14th, Petrucci 15th, Crutchlow 16th, Smith 17th, Abraham 18th, Kallio 19th, Barberá 20th, Bautista 21st, Redding 22nd, Baz 23rd, Lowes 24th, Van der Mark 25th.

Without a doubt Viñales has not had a good session. He seems to have considerable set-up problems on his Yamaha; minutes before the start of Q1 he had both Yamahas dismantled and was looking for solutions to improve his feeling, but they could not give him that extra edge, and the young rider was visibly angry with this result.

And after Q1, came Q2, the decisive one, the moment of truth for MotoGP, with several favourites and all eyes on Márquez and Dovi. It was the 93 who started putting some pressure on the times, managing to go first in the opening minutes and already with very interesting lap times.

With 8 minutes to go we saw Lorenzo go down, and run back to his garage to get the second Ducati and keep fighting for times. But the 99 was not the only one to crash: Marc, who had been among the fastest, also went down with 2 minutes left, losing all chances of continuing to fight on track, and keeping a close eye on the times of the rest of the riders.

No rider managed to improve on Márquez’s times, although Iannone and Zarco tried at the last moment, but neither of them got close to the times of the rider from Honda, with Zarco finishing 0.349s behind and Iannone 0.502s off the leader. The top 12 was completed with Lorenzo 4th, Pedrosa 5th, Pirro 6th, Rossi 7th, Aleix 8th, Dovi 9th, Rins 10th, Pol 11th, Miller 12th.

On to the race.