Pol: I thought of trying to catch Marquez as he landed!
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Pol Espargaro was just behind Marc Marquez when the reigning MotoGP champion was thrown into a vicious highside during morning practice at Buriram in Thailand.The KTM rider was so close he later joked that he thought about trying to catch Marquez as he landed.But already riding with a recently fractured wrist after a very similar out-lap highside at Aragon, Espargaro admitted the Marquez incident spooked him a little and he elected not to fit new soft rubber at the end of the Friday sessions.”After this morning and the of Marquez, I took it a little bit easier and didn’t put a new tyre at the end of FP2,” Espargaro said. “I used the medium and even like that I was only one-second off the top, which is interesting. So tomorrow it’s going to be the day to risk a little bit more. Let’s see how it goes and how the pain is when I wake up tomorrow morning.”Returning to the Marquez incident, Espargaro added: “Honestly, I was really scared! I was close to opening the throttle to try and catch him as he landed!”I don’t know what happened. He was not very offline. He was not pushing. He had just exited from pitlane and the body position was maybe not the correct one. It was very similar to my in Aragon and then Miguel’s in FP1.”While Espargaro’s accident was put down to a cold tyre in Aragon, the air temperature was over 30-degrees in Thailand this morning, and track temp above 50.”We kind of say cold tyre, but the tyre’s never really cold,” Espargaro explained. “The problem is not being in the operating temperature range that the tyre must work in. Then this can happen.”Espargaro, who had a plate fitted in his left wrist at the start of last week, had a scare of his own when he saved a front-end slide with his elbow at the final corner.”Yeah that was close. We are used to doing these kind of things, but the problem is we are not on the TV always so you don’t see it! So it’s not the first one, but I’m happy because we could save it.”I saved it with my right elbow. I don’t think if it was on the left I could have saved it.”Espargaro was 15th fastest and the top KTM rider on Friday, 1.095s from Fabio Quartararo (Petronas Yamaha).”4After being taken for hospital checks Marquez returned to action in FP2, leading much of the session.
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