One lap pace continued to elude the factory Honda HRC pairing of Luca Marini and Joan Mir as the duo begin the Hungarian GP weekend with 13th and 16th respectively.
One lap pace continued to elude the factory Honda HRC pairing of Luca Marini and Joan Mir as the duo begin the Hungarian GP weekend with 13th and 16th respectively.
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| Hungarian Grand Prix - Friday Practice |
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Friday, 5th June 2026 |
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| Hungarian Grand Prix, Balaton Park Circuit |
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Frustrating Friday for Marini and Mir in Hungary |
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| One lap pace continued to elude the factory Honda HRC pairing of Luca Marini and Joan Mir as the duo begin the Hungarian GP weekend with 13th and 16th respectively. |
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Balaton Park saw the return of the MotoGP World Championship for Round 8 of the 2026 season; the tight Hungarian track an immediate contrast to the fast and flowing Mugello circuit from just a week ago. With fond memories from 2025, both Luca Mairni and Joan Mir were eager to get back out and begin working.
A complicated first day at the Hungarian GP saw Luca Marini take eighth in the morning before improving his best lap time by almost half a second in the afternoon to a 1’37.949. Despite the improvements, the Italian would find himself outside of the top ten by less than two tenths of a second as half a second split nine riders between tenth and 19th place. Adjusting his Honda RC213V for the Q1 battle will be his and the Honda HRC Castrol squad’s overnight objective, Marini sure to be in the mix alongside his teammate.
Joan Mir’s Friday saw the #36 struggle to find the correct feeling with his Honda RC213V as his team experimented with setup options. The close gaps which have become standard in the modern MotoGP era meant that the 2020 World Champion’s situation seemed more dramatic than reality. A best lap of 1’38.024 was less than three tenths from the top ten and barely a tenth of his teammate’s time. With Friday hopefully absorbing all of the bad luck, Mir remains hopeful that Saturday still holds positives.
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| Luca Marini 10 |
| Honda HRC Castrol |
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“We arrived with positive intentions and desires, but we encountered the same situation as in the previous races: we can’t take advantage of the soft tyre and the time attack like the others. We achieved our maximum today and all we can do is focus on making some changes for tomorrow morning and try to get out of Q1. We are really close so I hope we can make that very last step that we need overnight.”
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| Joan Mir 36 |
| Honda HRC Castrol |
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“Quite unexpected what happened today because we really had a lot of struggles to get the front working in the correct way. Things just didn’t quite go correctly today and there were many small things which didn’t go our way. I hope this means we have gotten all of our bad luck out of the way and we can have some good luck tomorrow. Our position probably looks much worse than it is because the gaps where we are in the time sheets are very close. Saturday is always full of surprises.”
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