Yet Bastianini's late crash when
chasing down the leaders, as
well as Marc Marquez's (Gresini
Ducati) suffering a blown engine
in the fifth-ever Indonesian GP,
did at least narrow this fight
down to two.
There was no escaping that
the question of Martin's bottle
hung over the start: could he
keep his head? The opening
all about not making] the same
mistake as yesterday."
Bagnaia was on hand to take
advantage of the Saturday slip
before calling this "a cham
-
pionship of mistakes." It was
hard to disagree. The Austrian
GP in mid-August was the last
weekend that neither of the top
two had made a glaring error in
either the Sprint or feature race.
crash on Saturday when he was
comfortable and leading, and
the contest there for the taking.
That spill at turn 16—as well as
his crash from the lead in last
year's duel here—was replayed
over and over in each of Sun
-
day's 27 laps. "When I was on
lap 13, I started to have some
ghosts about last season," he
said. "Then in turn 16, [it was
VOLUME ISSUE OCTOBER , P89
was able to brake super late and over-
take, but I'm not super happy about
the result. I was fast and finished
closer to the riders ahead, which is
positive. We are working and improv-
ing step by step. We have been in Q2
two race weekends in a row, and we
got P7 in the last two races, so we are
heading in the right way. But rather
than focusing on positions, I think we
need to focus on how fast we are go-
ing, and today we had good speed."
36 JOAN MIR
DNF/DNF MOTOGP
"We can't be happy with the weekend
with all our bad luck, two crashes
from two starts. I could see that the
performance of the bike has improved
but it's frustrating that we weren't able
to put that onto the track finally. When
you look at Zarco you can see that
the upgrades Honda have prepared
are a clear step. We will sit down
and look for ways to keep improving
again. Motegi [October 4-6] should be
a more normal weekend for us."
MYOWNRACE
