Jorge Martin ended a near four-month Grand Prix winless drought to win the MotoGP race in Indonesia around the Mandalika International Circuit.
The Spanish rider dominated from flag to flag as rookie Pedro Acosta and Francesco Bagnaia joined the championship leader on the podium.
Martin and Bagania’s Ducati team-mate Enea Bastianini got off to the best possible start to claim first and second place, with Acosta running in third.
Chaos ensued on the first Lap as Alex Marquez, Aleix Espargaro, Jack Miller, and Luca Marini all crashed at Turn 3. Replays showed that Miller aboard his KTM machine, instigated the collision with the remaining riders.
Bagnaia’s dropped from fourth to sixth after Lap 1. The Italian rider showed that in the early stages, he wasn’t as competitive as he had been during the Sprint race on Saturday.
Acosta lunged past Bastianini to claim second spot on Lap 4, with Martin a distant 1.4s in front.
Pramac’s Franco Morbidelli and VR46’s Marco Bezzecchi both had their turn to overtake the factory Ducati rider on Lap 5 and 6, forcing Bastianini to settle for fifth as the race approached the halfway stage.
Gresini’s older brother Marc Marquez forced his way up the inside Bagnaia on Lap 6 before Bagnaia cut back on the inside, with Fabio Di Giannantonio swooping past the pair of them.
Elsewhere, the Yamaha and Honda riders Fabio Quartararo and Johann Zarco qualified in sixth and seventh. Still, the duo fell to 13th and 10th spots, showing more work needs to be done to compete with the European teams.
Di Giannantonio was still combating a collarbone injury before a crash at Turn 10 on Lap 9 from sixth place.
Brad Binder recovered well on his KTM, having qualified in 18th place, to put himself up to eighth by Lap 11, with the South African navigating his way up the grid in his usual manner having avoided being caught up in the events of Lap 1.
Marquez was forced to retire his bike halfway through Lap 12 because it set itself on fire. The Spaniard was sitting seventh before these events, and the six-time champion was no match for the GP24s and Bezzecchi in front.
The leading gap between Martin and Acosta was reduced from 1.4s to 0.8s, with the rookie aiming to earn that elusive first win in MotoGP.
Martin responded with the championship leader posting his best lap time of the race, but the gap between the Spanish duo hovered between 0.8s and 1.1s.
Bastianini and Morbidelli squabbled for third place, with the factory Ducati rider claiming the third spot before Morbidelli aggressively responded into the next turn.
Bastianini made the move stick at Turn 12, with just under 3s to make up to catch the leading duo.
The factory Ducati rider displayed rapid speed to cut the gap in half inside one and a half laps, with the Italian lapping half a second quicker than the leader, Martin.
Back-to-back lap times of 1.30.5’s saw him as close as 1.3s behind the back of Acosta, but a fast crash at Turn 1 ended his risky approach of going as far over the limit as possible.
Despite falling to 13th in the race’s early phases, Quartararo regained five places to put himself up to eighth, with Bastianini’s crash putting him up to seventh.
With only 12 classified riders left in the race with 6 Laps to go, nearly half of the grid had either retired due to bike problems or crashed out of proceedings.
Bagnaia capitalised on a Bezzecchi mistake to move up to fourth, before overtaking Morbidelli on Lap 23 to put himself back into podium contention.
With the chaos unfolding for the final podium place, Martin stretched his lead further to Acosta to 2.1s.
Tyre wear played its part in the final stages, with the top three stretching further and further apart, but no one was able to match Martin.
The Spaniard earned his first Grand Prix since Le Mans in May, extending the championship lead to 21 points.
Acosta delivered a strong second for GasGas, but he had to report to the stewards due to tyre pressures – luckily avoiding a penalty as the irregularity was caused by a leaking wheel rim.
Bagnaia rounded off the podium spots despite his poor start, with fellow VR46 Academy riders Morbidelli and Bezzecchi behind.
Maverick Vinales delivered a strong result for Aprilia to finish in sixth place, with Quartararo behind in seventh for Yamaha.
Binder and Zarco sealed eighth and ninth place, with Trackhouse Racing’s Raul Fernandez rounding off the top-10.
TLCR Honda’s Takaaki Nakagami and Yamaha’s Alex Rins finished 11th and 12th as the final two classified riders, but the former was later handed a 16-second time penalty for a tyre pressure infringement.
