Software glitch blamed for delayed Marc Marquez pole lap cancellation

The delay in cancelling Marc Marquez’s MotoGP Japanese Grand Prix pole lap has been blamed on a software glitch.

The Gresini rider set a 1m42.868s in the closing stages of Q2 on Saturday morning at Motegi to take provisional pole, but had the lap cancelled for exceeding track limits.

However, the lap didn’t come off the board until after the chequered flag was flown, which meant he had no time to try for another time and was dumped to ninth on the grid.

The Gresini team was furious with this in its garage, while Marquez replied to a MotoGP social media post about him exceeding track limits with: “Agreed [with the penalty] but… the notification times are the notification times.”

While the initial stewards’ document for Saturday’s incidents did not offer an explanation on the Marquez situation, a later update revealed a software glitch was to blame.

“The MotoGP stewards investigated a delayed track limits application concerning Marc Marquez,” the brief statement read.

“This was determined to be due to a software glitch and the lap was therefore manually cancelled.”

Marquez told TNT Sport on the matter: “Yeah, of course this morning was a bit confusing, especially for that late notification because on the bike it’s impossible to realise if you touch the green sometimes or not.

“Then I saw the lap was not cancelled, so I said ‘Ok, there’s no point to pushing more’, because there were some drops [of rain].

“So I said with that lap time I’ll be on the front row, which was the target.

“Unfortunately for us, there was that very late notification.

“The stewards told me that they had problems with the connections.

“Unlucky, but it is what it is. The job was try to forget that, concentrate on the sprint race and we did our best one more time.”

Marquez came through to fourth in the early laps of the sprint and was promoted to third when Pedro Acosta crashed out of the lead.

He battled hard with Enea Bastianini for second in the latter stages, but had to concede defeat to the factory Ducati rider.

“It’s true that in those first laps I was pushing a bit too much and then I overheated the front tyre,” he added.

“Then I cooled down a bit to try to understand where I was, but then in the last laps I was catching them and I was starting to ride in a very good way.

“In that fight with Enea, in that last lap he defended super good and it was too much risk [to pass him]. I tried, because I try, but he defended in a very good way.”