Stefan Bradl bucked the trend of Friday practice at Brno by going quicker in the afternoon than he had been in the morning, ending the opening day on top.
125cc and MotoGP pacesetters Nicolas Terol and Dani Pedrosa were unable to match their early benchmarks but Bradl shaved four tenths of a second off his FP1 time, and as it turned out, he needed to.
The German was forced to wait until the final three minutes before edging ahead of Alex de Angelis who had initially set the pace on his Motobi machine, but the action wasn't over, as Andrea Iannone emerged from nowhere to set the second fastest time, just 0.158s adrift. De Angelis was forced to settle for third with a sizeable gap by Moto2 standards opening up behind them.
Championship contender Marc Marquez was next up in fourth but was a full seven tenths away from his rival Stefan Bradl. Julian Simon matched his pace in fifth while Scott Redding completed an encouraging day with sixth for Marc VDS Racing.
Mattia Pasini was seventh on board the quickest of the FTRs in seventh ahead of Max Neukirchner on the first of the MZ-RE Hondas. Aleix Espargaro took ninth while Simone Corsi completed the top ten on the second Ioda Racing FTR.
A number of big names found themselves unusually low down the order with Bradley Smith down in 17th, one place behind Tech 3 teammate Mike Di Meglio, while star of the Sachsenring Randy Krummenacher finished down in 21st place. Yuki Takahashi also struggled to finish 25th with former MotoGP rider Mika Kallio 26th.
