Alex Marquez offered an explanation for the bizarre crash that red-flagged Friday afternoon’s Practice session at the Austrian Grand Prix.
The Spanish rider had already exited Turn 1 of the Spielberg circuit, and had the Gresini Ducati upright, when he lost control of the bike after a small wheelie and tumbled heavily to the ground.
The curious accident occurred inside the final quarter of an hour, just as riders were starting to push for meaningful lap times. The resulting stoppage led to a final stanza of under 12 minutes once action resumed.
An unhurt Marquez, who managed to put the accident behind him and produce a top-10 lap with his spare bike after the restart, explained that a stuck brake was the root of the problem.
“The brakes always are quite on the limit here and sometimes, you know, they lock a little bit,” he said. “At that point they were a little bit locked.
“It was the first [flying] lap [of the run], so it’s just that, you know, here we have also a lot of wheelie and then when [the front wheel comes back down], you know, everything needs to be perfect to not crash. In that moment, the brakes were a little bit of a strange problem.
“It’s not a nice crash because you don’t expect it and your body is not ready for that. But everything is okay.”
The afternoon crash was not the only odd incident for Marquez on Friday in Austria. During the morning session, he ran off the circuit after a large piece of his lower fairing came loose on the left side of the bike.
“Yeah, I tried a few different modifications, but also, you know, I had that issue in FP1 with the fairing that was, you know, the main issue for us and I was not able to do the back-to-back [technical comparisons].”
But Marquez, who has been known to bounce back strongly from shaky Fridays and Saturdays in the past – most recently at Misano last weekend – remained focused on the bigger picture.
“It’s not how the weekend starts, it’s how the weekend finishes. So we’ll try to turn things around.”
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