MotoGP Indianapolis: Marc Marquez on top in third practice session

The reigning world champion went fastest with his first flying lap of the session early on, and with seven minutes remaining he extended his advantage over the field to four tenths of a second.

At that point, Friday pacesetter Jorge Lorenzo was second fastest on his factory Yamaha, but by the end of the session he had been pushed down to fifth by Bradley Smith, Andrea Iannone and Dani Pedrosa.

Lorenzo's session was much more convincing than his team-mate Valentino Rossi's though, as the championship leader spent much of the session outside of the top 10 cut-off to automatically pass through to Q2 later today.

Rossi used a medium rear tyre to briefly get as high as fourth, but he was shuffled back to ninth.

While Rossi eventually made the Q2 cut, Ducati's Andrea Dovizioso was a high-profile casualty as he failed to improve on his best time from Friday and dropped to 11th in the combined classification.

Both Ducatis appeared to be in trouble in the closing stages, with Iannone's first lap of his final run only good enough for 10th (and knocking Dovizioso out of a Q2 berth), but Iannone found more time on his next effort to move up to third as the flag came out.

Yamaha-contracted Tech 3 rider Pol Espargaro suffered his second crash of the weekend in the closing minutes, falling on the approach to Turn 2 shortly after setting a time good enough for eighth by the time FP3 concluded.

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