Marc Marquez bitten by Balaton Park as new footage reveals two crashes

MotoGP championship leader Marc Marquez suffered two crashes during a recent Balaton Park track day with Ducati, a new behind-the-scenes video has revealed.

With MotoGP returning to Hungary next weekend for its maiden race at the new Balaton Park circuit - which hosted World Superbikes last month - Ducati staged a track day for its riders last week.

Present on Panigale V4S street bikes were Marc Marquez, Pecco Bagnaia, Alex Marquez, Fermin Aldeguer, Franco Morbidelli, Fabio Di Giannantonio and test rider Michele Pirro.

While the circuit was met with positive first impressions from the factory riders, it was not without its challenges.

A new episode of Ducati’s Inside video series revealed Marc Marquez seemingly suffered two crashes during the day as he tried to explore the limits of the front end on the circuit.

Conversing with Pirro after returning to the pits with scuffed leathers and a lightly damaged bike, Marquez said to him: “The engine braking on this bike is hard to understand.

“With used tyres, I changed to [engine] map three. But with map three, the bike pushes a lot.

“Same as the previous crash. Hard to understand why because I can’t use the rear brake. I changed to map three because I had used tyres and it’s much better for cornering.”

When asked by Pecco Bagnaia what happened, he added: “I overdid it. Same as the previous crash. I changed to map three because I had used tyres. Same as before.”

Bagnaia wasn’t without his own incident during the track day, as he suffered a huge rear-end moment over a kerb at one point of the test.

MotoGP calendar needs circuits with differing characters

What the mass consensus on Balaton Park with MotoGP bikes will be won’t be known until next week.

But Marc Marquez says the calendar needs to have tracks with differing characteristics.

“First impression of Balaton Park is it’s a different circuit,” he said.

“It’s quite slow. There are a lot of stop-and-go corner.

“I mean, the technicality is completely different compared to other tracks.

“But in the end, in the world championship you need to have other kinds of tracks. And the bike, the Panigale is working super good.”