Marquez not "comfortable" in Barcelona practice

Honda rider Marquez was fourth in first practice and only 12th in the afternoon session, in which he crashed out late on.

He ended the day exactly a tenth of a second outside the combined classification top 10, meaning that he would miss out on an automatic Q2 spot if he were unable to improve in FP3 on Saturday.

Asked whether he was struggling and having to fight his Honda through Friday's running, Marquez conceded: "It's true. It's true that today I didn't feel comfortable, because we have a small problem on the electronic side.

"We miss something there that I don't feel comfortable, and I have some really strange slides that normally in MotoGP it's not like this.

"We are missing something but the good thing is that we found this problem already in this hour and a half, so now we need to check the way to improve that we know more or less."

Marquez reckoned his FP2 incident, in which he fell off the bike at the sharp Turn 5 left-hander, was down to the condition of the tyres – but also a lack of confidence with the front of the bike.

"Looks like every FP2 I need to crash," Marquez joked. "I was riding with the used tyres, with the hard [front] - hard [rear], and maybe was the second lap [of the run], maybe the front tyre was still not ready 100 percent.

"But apart from that also I'm missing the feeling a little bit on the entry of the corner and we are trying to find the problem.

"We check a little bit, and we found, but now we need to see how we can improve."

While he'd ended the day facing a potential Q1 appearance, Marquez's ultimate pace was deceptive – as, unlike every rider ahead of him, he did not use the soft tyre compound on the rear.

"With all these problems, on the race pace I'm there, in the top three," Marquez stressed. "So this is the most important."

Additional reporting by German Garcia Casanova