MADRID, 11 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish rider Alex Márquez (Ducati) won this Saturday in the sprint race of the Malaysian Grand Prix, the eighteenth round of the motorcycle World Championship, while Jorge Martín (Ducati), who finished second, has reduced points in the general classification to the leader, the Italian Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati), who completed the podium.
Fourth in Q2, the youngest of the Márquezs had a perfect race to overcome the favorites and win his second sprint victory in Sepang, all after overcoming a rib injury that hampered him in the previous Grands Prix. In this way, he topped a podium ahead of the contenders to be crowned champions.
Martín managed to defend his second starting place and with this he managed to cut two points in the championship standings from ‘Pecco’, who could not retain his pole position and finished third. Now, the transalpine team is only 11 points ahead of the team from San Sebastián de los Reyes.
Once the traffic lights were turned off, Alex Márquez and the Italian Enea Bastianini (Ducati) overtook a Martín who erred on the side of caution, while Bagnaia tried to escape. Just one lap later, Bastianini dropped three positions at once and the KTMs of Australian Jack Miller and South African Brad Binder joined the fight.
The man from Cervera tried to overtake the leader in the last corner before entering the finish line, but his move was frustrated and left him at the feet of Martín, with whom he began a tough battle for second position. With five laps to go, Márquez overtook Bagnaia, and shortly after it was ‘Martinator’ who did it on the inside, and the final positions were decided.
Meanwhile, Marc Márquez (Repsol Honda) crashed before completing the fourth lap, when he had climbed from twentieth starting position to the ‘Top 13’; With this, he equals his 2017 record of 27 falls in a single season. Joan Mir (Repsol Honda) also finished in the gravel, and the two teammates finished twenty-first and twenty-third, respectively.
As for the rest of the Spaniards, all of them also out of the points, Maverick Viñales (Aprilia) closed the ‘Top 10’; Aleix Espargaró (Aprilia) was twelfth; Augusto Fernández (KTM) finished fourteenth, just ahead of his teammate Pol Espargaró (KTM); Raúl Fernández (Aprilia) finished seventeenth; Iker Lecuona (Honda) twentieth; and Álvaro Bautista (Ducati), new Superbike champion and who competes with a ‘wild card’ in Sepang on his return to the World Championship, twenty-second.