“I expect to leave Assen tomorrow with a better feeling and a better result,” MotoGP superstar Marc Marquez announced on Saturday evening after he had crashed in qualifying and the sprint. Almost 24 hours later, it can be said that the 32-year-old Spaniard was only partially right. In fourth place, he initially scored 13 World Championship points and finished the Dutch TT as the best GP23 rider. A little later, however, a time penalty for not reaching the minimum tire pressure dropped him back to tenth place, which explains two strange scenes from the main race.
What does that mean? Marquez had an excellent start in the Dutch TT and was already in third place at the start of the second lap – directly behind his World Championship rivals Francesco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin. However, he was unable to keep up with the duo and instead lost more ground with each lap. This got to the point where by the middle of the eighth lap Marquez had already lost almost 2.5 seconds to second-placed Martin and then allowed himself to be carried away by a strange move. At the exit of Turn 8 he turned around and indicated with his finger that he would let the man behind him, Fabio Di Giannantonio, pass in the following turn T9.
Marc Marquez slowed down by MotoGP minimum tyre pressure in Assen
The Gresini rider actually did this and then sat on Di Giannantonio’s rear wheel, where he stayed until lap 19. Then came the second strange scene: This time it was the VR46 rider who – again in turn nine – took his foot off the accelerator a little too far and slightly to let Marquez pass again. But he obviously didn’t want to pass and then slowed down as well. Maverick Vinales took the opportunity to overtake both of them and a little later Enea Bastianini also passed him.
“Perhaps his team had set the tire pressure for sunshine and to be stuck behind another rider. I am convinced that he received a warning from his dashboard that the tire pressure was too low. That’s why he had to let someone pass,” MotoGP expert Simon Crafar revealed his initial suspicion at ‘After the Flag’ and seemed to have been on the right track. Because a little later, Vinales also explained in his media round: “I understood relatively quickly what it was about: the tire pressure in the front tire. They wanted to be behind in order to increase it again. So let’s wait for the news. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it was below the minimum value.”
At least in the case of the six-time MotoGP world champion, Vinales was proven right. Shortly after 5 p.m., Marquez was given a 16-second time penalty by the stewards for not having the prescribed minimum pressure in the front tire. The Spaniard dropped to tenth place as a result, while Vinales climbed to fifth place. “I was 0.01 bar under the prescribed pressure for one lap. That’s annoying, but that’s the rules,” commented Marquez later, blaming slight contact with Enea Bastianini for his under-pressure.
Change in weather puts MotoGP riders in trouble in Assen
But why did the MotoGP star have such big problems with the tire pressure that he even voluntarily refrained from overtaking? The Gresini engineers had certainly not miscalculated. “That was a mistake on all of our part, we are a team. Many Ducatis were at the limit, it was damn difficult today,” said Marquez, and then addressed the really decisive point: the weather. The conditions on the TT Circuit on Sunday were very different from those of the previous day. While the sun had shone on the asphalt in the sprint, it was only visible at the start of the main race. After that, it increasingly retreated behind a thick blanket of clouds, causing the track temperature to drop from 35 to 30 degrees. By comparison: in the sprint, the MotoGP stars still had to contend with asphalt temperatures in the high 40s. The wind also increased significantly, which further cooled the tires on the straights.
This change in the weather was already foreseeable on Saturday, but the sunshine shortly before the start of the race probably prompted many drivers to start the Dutch TT with the hard front tire. Only the four Hondas and world championship leader Martin dared to start the race with the softer medium variant. When the sun disappeared, however, some drivers on the hard front tire suddenly had problems keeping the temperature up. Di Giannantonio was one of them, and decided to let the guys behind him pass on lap 19. “It was annoying that I had to reduce my speed at one point because my front tire was getting a bit too cold. I almost lost it a few times in the fast corners. So I let the others pass, then I could fight again,” he reported on Sunday evening.
At least in his case, the tire pressure played no role. “I was only concerned with the grip,” Di Giannantonio clarifies and explains: “Here we take corners really fast and with a cold tire you don’t have enough time to react if you lose the front. You can’t compensate for that.”
This was probably a wise decision, as crashes on the TT Circuit in Assen rarely end without pain. This was already evident on Friday and Saturday, when many pilots flew off heavily in ‘Ruskenhoek’. You can find out why changes to the track are now being called for in the following video: