MotoGP | Martin: “Before I crashed I was the king of the paddock, now I’m not the worst”

Everything was perfect: Jorge Martin was on his way to a double at the Sachsenring, but on the German Sunday he ended up in the gravel. The Pramac rider slipped, putting the victory and the championship leadership in the hands of Pecco Bagnaia.

With the zero of the German Grand Prix, Martin also loses the lead of the championship and goes into the summer break with a 10-point gap from rival Pecco Bagnaia, author of a series of incredible weekends: “It’s frustrating to crash after 27 laps in the lead. It hurts. It will be difficult to accept, but you can’t help but pick yourself up. It’s an important moment in my career to understand why this happens to me, because I crashed twice while I was leading.”

“I don’t know if it’s a problem with my riding or my head, but I have to get up and keep fighting, analyzing what happened with a cool head and focusing on getting back to being the strongest. Now we have three weeks to understand where we went wrong and see where to improve. I’d rather it happen now than in Malaysia,” explained Martin, who however prefers to pay for his mistakes now rather than end up like last year, when he ruined everything in the final.

But what happened? The Spaniard tried to explain the causes, which however are not yet clear to him: “The fall was the result of a mistake, without excuses. We need to understand it and analyze it well. I haven’t even had time to analyze it, but it will certainly be difficult to sleep tonight. We start again tomorrow. I don’t think it depends on motivation”.

“Two hours before I crashed I was the king of the paddock, now I don’t think I’m the worst. These things can happen. There’s something that I don’t know what it is. There were a few laps left of a race that was practically won, I had everything under control, I was riding quite well, maybe I even had a bit of a margin on Pecco,” said the Madrid native, who can’t digest the mistake.

Despite the crash, Martin wants to see the glass half full by summing up a weekend that saw him as the favorite. Pole, victory in the Sprint and dominance in the race… Until the crash: “The race was perfect, there was a moment when Bagnaia overtook me, but I needed him to push. I saw myself with a lot of strength for the end of the race, up until that point Pecco had not managed to recover the gap and I think he would have struggled”.

“Until the crash it was a great race, I rode very well and it’s a shame about the ending. This weekend I was superior in terms of riding, obviously I crashed, it’s clear that I didn’t finish the job. But yesterday I took pole, I won the Sprint… It would be great to go on holiday saying ‘I’m the king’, but that’s not the case,” he concluded.