Jorge Martin defeated Aprilia team-mate and main MotoGP title rival Marco Bezzecchi in victory battle at the French Grand Prix at Le Mans.<\/p>\n
With the factory Aprilia duo the overwhelming title favourites following reigning champion Marc Marquez’s injury withdrawal for two rounds, their battle took on extra significance – and Martin’s charge enabled a 10-point championship swing.<\/p>\n
Bezzecchi took the lead off the line, allowed to establish an early buffer by scrapping between Fabio Quartararo and Pedro Acosta right behind him.<\/p>\n
Martin, who went eighth to first in the span of three corners in the sprint, had another great start here but found himself boxed in, so sat seventh initially.<\/p>\n
With Bezzecchi in control, his good friend (and future team-mate) Pecco Bagnaia undid some of the damage from a poor start from pole by working his way past Quartararo and Acosta – but went down from second on lap 16 at the Dunlop chicane.<\/p>\n
By that point a charging Martin had been bearing down on the podium trio, and it took him little time to clear Acosta for second – though the block-pass through the Dunlop chicane left him 1.6s off the lead.<\/p>\n
But Martin had much more in hand than Bezzecchi, whittling down the lead in multi-tenth chunks, so with five laps to go he was already in near-striking range.<\/p>\n
The move finally came on the third-to-last lap, lap 25, with Bezzecchi having no response to an attack into the chicane and unable to keep pressure up on Martin.<\/p>\n
Acosta had faded significantly by then, but Bezzecchi was nearly vulnerable in second to a charging Ai Ogura, who like Martin had scythed his way through the field.<\/p>\n
Ogura ultimately settled for his first MotoGP podium and rounding out an Aprilia 1-2-3. With Raul Fernandez in eighth, Aprilia now has all four of its full-time riders in the top six in the standings – with Bezzecchi and Martin split by just one point at the top.<\/p>\n
Acosta was denied one more position at the very end, picked off by Fabio Di Giannantonio entering Raccordement and having to accept fifth place.<\/p>\n
Quartararo brought the V4-engined Yamaha in sixth, capping off the new bike’s best-by-an-enormous-margin weekend so far. <\/p>\n
He had been briefly relegated to seventh when Honda rider Joan Mir went past but Mir crashed a lap later, meaning he has one finish (a 15th place) from five Sunday races this season.<\/p>\n
There were also crashes from Brad Binder, Diogo Moreira and Alex Marquez.<\/p>\n
Race results<\/p>\n
1 Jorge Martin (Aprilia)
2 Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia) +0.477s
3 Ai Ogura (Trackhouse Aprilia) +0.874s
4 Fabio Di Giannantonio (VR46 Ducati) +2.851s
5 Pedro Acosta (KTM) +2.991s
6 Fabio Quartararo (Yamaha) +7.756s
7 Enea Bastianini (Tech3 KTM) +8.615s
8 Raul Fernandez (Trackhouse Aprilia) +12.497s
9 Fermin Aldeguer (Gresini Ducati) +14.903s
10 Luca Marini (Honda) +15.016s
11 Johann Zarco (LCR Honda) +16.549s
12 Alex Rins (Yamaha) +32.343s
13 Toprak Razgatlioglu (Pramac Yamaha) +32.476s
14 Franco Morbidelli (VR46 Ducati) +32.774s
15 Jack Miller (Pramac Yamaha) +36.059s
16 Jonas Folger (Tech3 KTM) +1m13.229s
DNF Brad Binder (KTM)
DNF Joan Mir (Honda)
DNF Pecco Bagnaia (Ducati)
DNF Diogo Moreira (LCR Honda)
DNF Alex Marquez (Gresini Ducati)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jorge Martin defeated Aprilia team-mate and main MotoGP title rival Marco Bezzecchi in victory battle at the French…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-661984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661984","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=661984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}