On Saturday at the French Grand Prix<\/a>, however, he finally breached the top three in a sprint for the first time in 2026.<\/p>\nHaving briefly led at the start of the race, a mistake at Turn 7 on the third lap dropped him behind Pecco Bagnaia, with Bezzecchi admitting that he struggled with the front-end of his Aprilia throughout.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWell, I was not really feeling good at the beginning, especially,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe front for me was a bit of a problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, this is why I made this mistake [at Turn 7 that let Bagnaia through].<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I also made a couple of more during the rest of the sprint when I was behind Pecco.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, it was impossible for me to stay with him.<\/p>\n
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\u201cFortunately, it was enough to escape from Pedro.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut because of this, I\u2019m satisfied; finally, a good result also on Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was something that I was having nightmares [about] every day at home. So, today is finally good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bezzecchi\u2019s podium came as team-mate Jorge Martin charged from eighth on the grid to take the lead at Le Mans\u2019 Dunlop chicane on the opening lap.<\/p>\n
Martin carried on to build a solid lead and took the chequered flag for his second sprint victory of the season.<\/p>\n
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As a result, the 2024 world champion is now just six points behind Bezzecchi in the standings going into Sunday\u2019s French Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aprilia\u2019s Marco Bezzecchi says he was \u201chaving nightmares at home\u201d over his struggles in MotoGP sprints in 2026,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[10669,64,63,10732,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-660282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-aprilia-racing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-marco-bezzecchi","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}