Aprilia’s Espargaro explains last-lap Catalan MotoGP mistake

Poleman Espargaro was running in second behind runaway leader and eventual winner Fabio Quartararo in the latter stages of the race having pulled away from Pramac’s Jorge Martin.

But the Aprilia rider made a massive error in judgement when he backed off crossing the line at the end of the penultimate lap, as he believed he’d taken the chequered flag.

Espargaro – who apologised to his team for the error, which cost him eight seconds and left him down in fifth in the end – says the placement of his pit board had forced him to use the circuit’s timing tower to keep an eye on the lap count.

But he “forgot” that the final lap on the Barcelona system registers as zero, rather than one, which led to his mistake.

“Sorry, the only thing I can say is sorry, it’s a mistake that is not admittable at this category,” Espargaro said, having slipped 22 points behind Quartararo in the standings.

“It’s completely my fault, my pit board was too close to the first corner – it was the first one, so I had no time to watch the laps and the gap with Martin.

“I was pushing to the limit, so I just watched the gap to Martin – 0.6s – and to watch the laps I watched the [timing] tower and I saw’ L1’.

“So, I did one lap and then I didn’t remember that here in Barcelona the last lap is number zero, not one.

“And I closed the gas on the straight, so I’m very sorry to my team because I know I didn’t have the speed of Fabio to win.

“But if I want to beat him in the championship, I cannot do these mistakes because today I lose nine points. So, I’m very sorry.”

Espargaro added that Quartararo was able to pull away from him so quickly at the start of the race because Michelin and his team had instilled “worry” into him over his tyre management.

This forced him to take the early laps easy on his medium rubber, and believes Quartararo wasn’t any faster than him – but was just “smarter”.

“Yesterday, between Michelin and my team everybody put a lot of worry into my body by saying I use the tyre a lot, that I had to be gentle on the first laps and I was too gentle because at the end of the race when I overtook Martin, I had rubber enough to put in 1m41.5s and go away,” he explained.

“I think Fabio was not faster than me, but he was smarter, he was able to push at the beginning but then it’s impossible at the end to recover 2.5s to Fabio.

“But I think I could go with him at the beginning, but anyway it’s like this.”