This past weekend’s visit to Indonesia left all of the main protagonists in the MotoGP title race with something to be happy about.

Some of the other riders were not quite so full of glee and we were all left annoyed by another annoying rule.

Martín two points to the good

Jorge Martín didn’t have quite the weekend he had hoped for. After Marc Márquez bagged the full 37 points at Motegi, Martín wanted to do the same in Mandalika.

A tyre pressure warning during the Sprint Race scuppered that idea, forcing the Aprilia rider to let his title rival through to take the lead. Martín then made a couple of mistakes that Ai Ogura and Fabio Di Giannantonio capitalised on to leave the previous race leader missing out on the podium altogether.

It was a real present for Márquez at the start of a weekend where he expected to suffer, based on Michelin’s hard rear tyre and Mandalika being his bogey track in recent years. He took the 12 points and then accepted what he could achieve from a gruelling Main Race, which turned out to be sixth place and another 10 points to his total.

As for Martín, he brought home his bike in third place to reclaim the championship lead by two points. It was certainly not the best weekend for him, but was solid enough given the misfortune he suffered in the Sprint.

Bez back on the top step

Aprilia were predicted to be the dominant manufacturer in Indonesia and that’s exactly how things panned out. They took the top four spots in the Main Race and probably would have done so in the Sprint too had two of their riders not collided at Turn One.

Marco Bezzecchi was able to dust himself down from a trip to the gravel on Saturday and rode superbly on Sunday to claim his first victory since the Italian GP back in May. Bez is third in the championship, 46 points behind his teammate. That’s still a sizeable gap with only five (potentially four …) rounds to go, yet it’s not insurmountable if his title rivals have a bad weekend or two.

Fuming Fernandez

The other Aprilia in the Turn One tangle also recovered with a second place finish in the Main Race.

Raul Fernandez somehow managed to pull that off whilst riding with two broken fingers from the Saturday crash; an absolutely heroic feat.

What was not so heroic was his sarcastic clapping towards Bez as he laid in the gravel.

He had every right to be frustrated given that he had shown electric pace prior to then to claim his first pole position, only to have a potential Sprint win taken from him at the first corner. The broken fingers he suffered also gave him just cause to be unimpressed by the accident in the heat of the moment.

However, this motorbike racing equivalent of waving an imaginary yellow card needs to be stamped out quickly. As in football, it’s starting to become a thing in which the rider/player is trying to draw attention to an incident being another rider’s fault.

Let the stewards get on with their job – they have plenty of practice given the shenanigans in Moto2 and Moto3 qualifying and free practice – and leave the theatrics to football.

Frustrated Fans

The tyre pressure warning nonsense that forced Jorge Martín to give up the race lead in the Sprint also afflicted a great battle in the Main Race.

Pedro Acosta and Marc Márquez were dicing with each other, and Ai Ogura, in an entertaining scrap for the 4th to 6th places; however, both Acosta and Márquez had to give ground at various points because tyre pressure warnings required them to get behind another rider.

The sight of a rider looking over their shoulder and pulling aside to let someone through like this is excruciating. Anyone with a single racing bone in their body should have only needed to have seen it once to immediately come up with another solution (such as Acosta’s idea of just basing the tyre pressure on the pre-race reading on the grid).

There is hope that the new Pirelli front tyre will make this less of a problem from next season and that cannot come soon enough (although it wouldn’t be fair to call it a Michelin problem). In any case, it doesn’t say a lot about the leadership in MotoGP that they’ve allowed this scenario to drag on for a few years.

How many rounds are left?

And as we’re on the topic of lamenting the leadership in MotoGP, the weekend strikes on Saudi airports have only heightened the concerns about Liberty Media dragging MotoGP and F1 to the Middle East over the next month.

There should be five rounds to go, with the Qatar GP sitting in between the two fly-aways in Australia and Malaysia, and then the final two rounds in Portugal and Spain (Valencia).

Presumably there is an ‘abort’ button that will be pressed if events mean that the Qatar round cannot go ahead, but if there isn’t an alternative venue to replace it at very short notice then it could make a huge difference in the title run-in.