Aleix: I won’t blame Marquez, I blame the Stewards
Aleix Espargaro was bumped wide after Turn 1 contact with Marc Marquez at the start of both of Sunday's races at the Styrian MotoGP.
The first clash sent Espargaro from 7th to back to 11th, but the race was later red-flagged due to the fiery accident for Dani Pedrosa and team-mate Lorenzo Savadori.
Espargaro made his displeasure with Marquez clear as they returned to the pits, but the pair clashed at the same place on the restart (pictured) - this time with a bit of help from Fabio Quartararo on the inside of Marquez - leaving Espargaro down in 17th place.
A nightmare day for Aprilia, after Savadori's ankle injury, then came to an early end when Espargaro suffered an engine problem on lap 4.
"I couldn’t finish the race due to a technical problem. this makes me more angry," Espargaro began.
"About Marquez. I won’t blame him. Marc is Marc. Every race he does overtakes like this for the last ten years. What I want to blame is the Stewards panel. I don’t know, maybe they were watching the last day of the Olympics. It’s tricky to understand. Marquez decides whatever actions he does during the race. He is free to do whatever he wants. But the Stewards have to penalise.
"There was no room at all. The first one he hit me really strongly on the arm. I was out of the track. Luckily Rins was on the other side, (otherwise) I could make a big mess there. In the second race the same. Let’s see if Race Direction will do something.
"When you see an action like this, you need to use the rules. What makes me angry is we penalise [only] when one rider makes another crash. But we have to penalise the action. It doesn’t matter the result.
"If today I hit Rins and we both crashed then (there would’ve been) a penalty. Because there was no crash, no penalty. [If it's as simple as this] why do we have the Stewards panel for? We don’t need it.
"Sincerely I don’t want to speak more about the Stewards panel. I understand nothing about their job. There is no communication between the riders and the Stewards panel. Nobody understands the penalties. It’s frustrating. But we cannot win.
"I’m angry because I did a good start, especially the second start. I was P5. But anyway, what makes me more angry is we couldn’t finish the race because of an engine failure. So this is the final result… Anyway, it's racing."
Marquez accepted he was more to blame for the first incident, but felt Espargaro was at fault for the second.
"We know Aleix. I mean, if I need to complain about all the contacts [from other riders], what can I do? In Holland, he touched me in the last chicane and I nearly crashed and I never complained. Here, in the first race, I had a big contact when Mir tried to overtake me and I didn't complain. This is racing," said the eight time world champion.
"It's true that – I always try to speak honestly – that in the first race, if somebody made a mistake it was me, because he went a little bit wide and I went in, because in the corner, if you just have a gap, then it's easy that somebody comes and you lose a lot of positions, so I went in. I didn't expect to have such a big contact, but he was there.
"And in the second race, it was his mistake. I started better than him, I was already in a good position, in the brake point I was parallel with him, but he just released the brakes and went in. Quartararo was inside [of me] and we had a contact.
"But first race my mistake, second race his mistake."
The Repsol Honda rider went on to finish in eighth place.
