Fermin Aldeguer “was faster” than Marc Marquez in his strongest corners in Austrian MotoGP

MotoGP championship leader Marc Marquez says he “tried to copy” Gresini rookie Fermin Aldeguer’s riding in left-handers at the Austrian Grand Prix as “he was faster than me”.

The 32-year-old won his sixth consecutive grand prix last weekend to keep his unbeaten run since Aragon alive at the Red Bull Ring.

It has given him a 142-point lead in the championship with nine rounds to go, though his winning margin at the end of a hard-fought Austrian Grand Prix was only just above a second.

At first having to chase down and then pass Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi, Marc Marquez’s final laps in the lead were spent being pursued rapidly by a charging Fermin Aldeguer on the Gresini Ducati.

Marquez admitted after the race that this “worried” him because of how good Aldeguer’s tyre preservation was relative to the rest of the Ducati stable.

The factory Ducati rider also revealed that Aldeguer was “faster than me” in his strongest area of riding, which was the left-handers at Turn 6 and 7.

“It’s true that for example during all the weekend I just checked my data and I didn’t check it a lot,” he began.

“But I did check his T3 [sector three], which is double left corners and one right. And he was faster than me.

“So, I said ‘left corners he is doing something’. And I saw that he keeps a lot the corner speed.

“And especially with the [tyre] casing we have this weekend, it’s something you need to do because if you do stop-and-go with just the rear floating and acceleration, you don’t have this extra grip.

“And here we had a different rear casing, and that corner speed helped him to keep the tyre and keep the speed and to not push the tyre a lot.

“I tried to copy him a bit in those two corners. In the rest I used my riding style because in the right corners he is super good and he is riding in a different way.”

Aldeguer was kept at bay by Marquez, though second represented his best MotoGP result in his short career.

The Gresini rookie’s charge late on was somewhat compromised by a sluggish start from sixth on the grid, as he dropped to the outer reaches of the top 10.

This is a noted area of weakness that Aldeguer says he is working on.