Aprilia's Aleix Espargaro has slammed the six-place grid penalty handed to him for impeding Marc Marquez in FP3 as “exaggerated”, as he drops from 13th to 19th for the MotoGP German Grand Prix.
Espargaro slowed in front of Marquez at the final corner during third practice, forcing him to abort his current lap and scrub his next tour as well.
The Aprilia rider – who was similarly blocked by Suzuki's Alex Rins at the same corner earlier in the session – was subsequently handed a six-place grid drop by race stewards, his punishment harsher as he was awarded three-place penalty at Catalunya for a similar incident.
Espargaro – who missed the Q2 cut in Q2 by just 0.009 seconds – doesn't feel he did anything wrong, and says it is “incredible” a collision between two riders is dealt a more lenient punishment, citing the three-place drop handed to Moto2 rider Stefan Manzi for hitting Federico Fuligni at Turn 2 on Friday.
“As far as the penalty is concerned, I am obviously not happy,” Espargaro fumed.
“I don't feel I made a mistake, I was off the line and for this I find the penalty exaggerated.
“In case of contact between riders we have seen penalties of 3 positions, as yesterday in Moto2, and this is incredible.
“We will start a long way back on a circuit where it is not easy to recover positions. I will have to give it my all.”
Speaking about his Saturday, he added: “Today we managed to be quite competitive and unfortunately we didn't have direct access to the second qualifying session for a few tenths of a second.
“We worked on both the setting and the choice of tyres, trying to use them for many laps and evaluating the behaviour of the different options.
“The lap in Q1 was very good but it was not enough, nine thousandths in this case have made the difference.”
Espargaro will now start just ahead of teammate Scott Redding, who put the second RS-GP 20th in qualifying, seven tenths away from the Q2 progression places.
