2018 MICHELIN AUSTRALIAN MOTORCYCLE GRAND PRIX - PART 2 - JUST BIKES

2018 Michelin Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix - Part 2

Sunday – Slow Start, Spectacular Finish

Race day at Phillip Island dawned cloudy and cool, but the forecast was for dry conditions. The morning Warm Up session produced a few spills, but nothing serious, so with the skies starting to clear and the weather warming up, the track action was about to heat up, too.

Moto3 Race – Amazing Arenas

The opening GP race saw polesitter Martin get a good start, but Gabriel Rodrigo (RBA BOE Skull Rider KTM) would get the holeshot into turn 1. Kaito Toba (Honda Team Asia) ran off the track at turn 2, but the remainder of the opening lap was incident free, with Martin regaining the lead.

But a lead usually means nothing in Moto3, as slipstreaming down the main straight can see frontrunners outside the top ten in a heartbeat and such was the case here: on lap 3, Martin led the field, but was eighth two laps later.

Bezzecchi, Martin’s championship challenger, was leading at the end of lap 10, but would be out of the race less than a lap later when he came together with Rodrigo at turn 10. Lorenzo Dalla Porta (Leopard Racing Honda) then inherited the lead, but soon lost it to Binder, who in turn lost it to Tony Arbolino (Marinelli Snipers Team Honda) in a typical Moto3 cluster. While this was happening midway through the 23-lap race, Martin bounced from as high as second to as low as seventh.

Dalla Porta was out of the race when he slid out at turn 2 on lap 13, but the big crash of the race came a lap later when Marcos Ramirez (Bester Capital Dubai Honda) had a fast and frightening collision with his team mate Jaume Masia at turn 3, putting both riders out and Masia into hospital with a suspected broken ankle.

Passing under the yellow flags relating to this accident, both Martin and Aron Canet (Estrella Galicia 0,0 Honda) were obliged to drop a position – something that’s not easy to do in a Moto3 scrum!

Arbolino, Martin, Canet, Binder and Dennis Foggia (Sky Racing Team VR46 KTM) then traded blows at the front of the pack, with di Giannantonio and Sasaki also in the mix in the final laps, especially when Binder ran wide into turn 4 with three laps to go.

At the same corner on the penultimate lap, Arbolino lowsided, just missing Martin, but collecting Foggia and ending the race for both.

Martin actually led the pack across the line for the start of the final lap, but in typical Moto3 style, there was a joker in that pack. Albert Arenas (Angel Nieto Team Moto3 KTM), who hadn’t led a lap for the entire race, was in the right position and slipstreamed his way to the line to take the win – his second of the 2018 season – by 0.052 seconds from di Giannantonio, with Celestino Vietti third in his second ever Moto3 race. Amazingly, the top fourteen finishers were covered by less than a second.

Martin, whose fifth place increased his championship lead over the luckless Bezzecchi to 12 points, would secure the Moto3 championship at the next round in Sepang.

RESULT – Moto3 Race (23 laps)