Enea Bastianini protests: "Excessive penalty." Joan Mir sees it differently

In Hungary, a weekend a bit below expectations for the rider from Rimini: the final result was heavily affected by two penalties, one caused by contact with Mir.

Enea Bastianini would like to be at the level of Pedro Acosta with his KTM, but he didn't manage it at Balaton Park Circuit either. After failing to gain access to Q2 in MotoGP Qualifying, condemning himself to start from fourteenth on a track where overtaking is difficult, he finished eighth in the sprint and ninth in the race.

On Sunday he also had to serve two long lap penalties. The first penalty was handed down for an unsafe rejoin, since on lap six he ran wide at turn 1 and, rejoining the racing line, made contact with Joan Mir. The second came for cutting turn 16. Without the two sanctions, he could have achieved a better result: finishing fifth or sixth was possible.

The Red Bull KTM Tech3 rider expressed his displeasure regarding the punishment imposed for the contact with Mir: "When I rejoined the track - reports Speedweek - I saw Joan too late. I touched him and received a long lap penalty. For me, it was excessive: maybe it would have been better if I had only been forced to give the position back. Joan didn’t crash and I was ahead of him. When I saw him, I tried to avoid him. The penalty was too harsh. For me it was a normal racing incident."

Bastianini believes it would have been enough to ask him to give the position back to the Honda HRC rider, instead of forcing him to serve a long lap that inevitably conditioned his race. Then, in the heat of trying to recover positions, he cut a chicane and, even though he let Toprak Razgatlioglu through and slowed down a bit, he didn’t manage to lose at least one second. In such cases, the regulations call for a long lap penalty. Obviously, the rider from Rimini had nothing to object to regarding this second sanction.

Mir, who retired from the race due to a crash at turn 11, explained that the contact with Bastianini affected him and that the penalty given to the Italian was correct: "The bike was quite damaged after Enea decided to rejoin the track that way - reports Motosan - and I think we crashed because the footpeg was detached... We need to analyze what happened carefully, because the crash was rather strange. Talk to Enea? No. The penalty seems right to me. I think he should talk to Race Direction, not to me."

Different opinions between Mir and Bastianini, then. No clarification between the two is necessary; the dynamics are fairly clear, although of course there can be differing views on the type of sanction to impose on someone who performs actions like the KTM Tech3 rider’s. Was the long lap excessive? Would it have been fairer to simply give the position back? The FIM MotoGP Stewards Panel deemed it necessary to punish the incident severely.