‘Bad feeling on the rear’ costs Nakagami, Marquez suffers technical issue

A crash for Takaaki Nakagami and a technical issue for Alex Marquez see LCR Honda leave Misano with just one point. 

After topping Sunday’s Emilia-Romagna MotoGP warm-up session - fifth time he’s done so this year, Takaaki Nakagami suffered a crash on lap seven of the 25 lap race.

The Japanese rider remounted before going on to finish 82 seconds down on race winner Marc Marquez. 

Although Nakagami claimed a point in the end, it’s a fourth race in six without a top ten for the 29 year-old. 

"Unfortunately, before the start of the race I had some issues with the rear feeling of the bike and I knew it was going to be difficult," said Nakagami.  

"I had a good start, but I as mentioned I had a bad feeling on the rear and we don’t really know what happened. 

"We’ll look into it and hopefully can find out what happened in the race. But anyway, we got one point after rejoining the race, so it wasn’t the best day, but we have to look forward to the next race and keep pushing."

Worryingly for LCR Honda, Marquez also suffered from a ‘strange’ feeling with the rear tyre, moments before a technical issue brought his race to an end. The two incidents came within a few corners of each other. 

Marquez added: "Today was completely different conditions compared to Friday and Saturday, but our set-up was really good for the race. 

"We did a good job in the race, I was feeling good although the rear did feel a little strange from the beginning. 

"Then unfortunately I had an issue with the bike and I needed to stop as I saw it on my dashboard. That’s how it is, sometimes life is like this, but we still have two races to build up again and to keep collecting the data that we did this weekend. 

"As I said before this weekend, we have three races to build up confidence for next year, we now have two to get a good result."