Not My Day in Germany 😕

Hi everyone, 

I expected more from Germany, I'll be honest – I felt I had the pace to be right there in contention for the podium, so to finish sixth and fade near the end was a bit disappointing. But saying that, I'm still third in the championship, and in general I felt I rode a smart race, I don't feel like I made any mistakes, and I was there or thereabouts the whole time. But anyway, today was not my day – and it was most definitely the day of Marc Marquez. 

You have to hand it to him – 11 wins in a row here, eight in a row in MotoGP – it's pretty crazy really. But this one, with everything he's gone through – I'm sure days like today, to feel like that again, would have kept him going last year when times were really hard for him with his injuries and surgeries, recovering the whole time. We've been seeing Marc get stronger and stronger each week and we came to 'his house' here in Sachsenring, and he did a fantastic job and managed the race really well. So full credit to him. 

That's the sort of race that shows why Marc is a multiple-time world champion – the races like that where he sees a few spots of rain and just goes, puts a big gap out front and then manages it from there. He completely deserves it, so hats off to him. 

For me, it was a frustrating one. I was managing my tyre well from the beginning of the race, but about a quarter of the way into the race I was switching the maps, I could feel a lot of lateral sliding off-gas and that was something we didn't really have all weekend. From there I was trying to manage it, but by the end I had nothing left on the left-hand side of the tyre. I never really pushed incredibly hard in the race, but I didn't have anything to fight with at the end. 

There's nothing to regret, I feel like most of my issues today were out of my control. I was doing everything I could to manage the tyre and it just wouldn’t stay under me today – it can happen sometimes, and today was one of those times unfortunately. 

When the rain came I tried to pass Aleix (Espargaro) but then he passed me back and was really slow, and I could see Marc really pull out a big gap. There's really only one place you can pass here, so I had to wait until the next lap to try to go. It was a shame to get held up by someone who wasn't willing to push. I felt I had the speed to go with Marc at that point, but when I passed Aleix I had a bit of a moment when it was raining at Turn 1 and almost had a high-side. And that was kind of that. 

Germany is a special track for me because it's where I made my world championship debut way back in 2011 in the 125s – only lasted three laps that day, but this was where it all started. On a Moto3 bike it’s a fantastic track, but on these MotoGP bikes she's a bit tight. But Sachsenring is fun because it has its own unique character, and it's nice to have it because a lot of the tracks we go to are pretty similar. You wouldn’t want 18 tracks like this one, but as a one-off it's nice to have something that's so left-field. 

Sachsenring is definitely not, let's say, a 'Ducati track' because you only have to look at the records, only one win here and very few other podiums, and there's always going to be tracks that suit one bike or another. This isn't usually one that suits for us so it's more how you can adapt your bike to the track over the weekend. Here's you're not changing directions all that much because it's basically all one way, going left the whole time. But this year we've already shown we can keep progressing and turn a couple more of these tracks that aren't considered to be Ducati tracks into ones that aren't too bad, like we did in Jerez with me and Pecco (Bagnaia) going 1-2.