Alex de Angelis - Photo Credit: MotoGP.com
Alex De Angelis topped the timesheets in second practice for the Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island as the trend of slower lap times continued through the afternoon.
In the 125cc class, the morning benchmark was only beaten in the dying moments while the top MotoGP runners failed to improve on FP1 at all and in Moto2, De Angelis' quickest time was four tenths shy of Stefan Bradl's stunning morning pace.
De Angelis, winner of this race 12 months ago, clocked a 1:34.466 during his first run of the afternoon and despite racking up 22 laps in total, that time remained unbeaten for the rest of the session.
After dominating the first session, Stefan Bradl had a quiet afternoon, keen to avoid a repeat of the accident he suffered during FP1. The German took second with half an hour to go but lost that position to Andrea Iannone 15 minutes later as the Japanese GP winner closed to within a tenth of De Angelis.
Bradl improved again on his final lap but missed out on second place by 0.012s although his morning effort mean he will top the combined classification overnight.
Claudio Corti was a surprise fourth on his return to the paddock after the Italtrans squad favoured Takaaki Nakagami for the Japanese round while the British pair, Scott Redding and Bradley Smith, ended the day in positive fashion with fifth and sixth respectively.
Mika Kallio was seventh on the second Marc VDS Suter ahead of Thomas Luthi and Mattia Pasini on the sole Ioda Racing FTR as teammate Simone Corsi sat the session out after an earlier crash.
After his heavy crash in FP1, Marc Marquez was back out on his spare Suter which is believed to be a lower spec to his first choice machine. The championship leader was 0.825s off the pace but that left him down in a disappointing 17th.
