Pol Espargaro - Photo Credit: MotoGP.com
Pol Espargaro kept up his record of topping every single session at the 2012 British Grand Prix by claiming a comfortable pole position on Saturday afternoon. The Spaniard denied home rider Scott Redding his first ever Grand Prix pole by overhauling him twelve minutes from time.
Espargaro was almost a full second ahead of the rest of the field in morning practice but it was Redding who made the faster start when the session got underway in seriously windy conditions. Redding put in a 2:08.823 at the end of his first run to knock Thomas Luthi off the top but the Marc VDS rider wasn't done there, and lowered the target time by another two tenths on his next foray out of the pits.
Espargaro had edged ahead of Luthi into second but was still over half a second down on his benchmark time from the morning. The Pons rider pulled it out of the back with twelve minutes to go though and delivered the fastest ever Moto2 lap around Silverstone, 2:08.011.
Despite his best efforts, Redding had no answer to the blistering pace of Espargaro but looked on course for second until the dying seconds when Andrea Iannone pinched the position from him. The Italian's course was helped by a mistake from Luthi which hindered Redding on his final lap, preventing him from mounting a challenge.
Iannone's exploits also denied the home fans the chance of seeing two riders on the front row with Bradley Smith pushed from third down to fourth. The Tech 3 rider will still be happy though with his best qualifying result of the season and will have some big names trailing him on the grid. After a heavy crash in practice, Marc Marquez could do no better than fifth with Claudio Corti beating Thomas Luthi to sixth, leaving the championship leader on the third row.
Johann Zarco will start eighth while a flurry of late improvements saw Alex de Angelis and Simone Corsi climb into the top ten. Gino Rea also found his best lap of the weekend in the latter stages and will start from a career best position of fourteenth tomorrow.
