Ducati rider Jack Miller was left kicking himself after a second straight MotoGP crash that leaves his championship hopes looking extremely remote.
Miller fell while chasing points leader Fabio Quartararo for third in the Styrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring.
The result leaves him down in fifth in the championship – the third-best Ducati behind Pramac rider Johann Zarco and his works team-mate Pecco Bagnaia – and 72 points away from Quartararo.
Miller was confident he was on course to beat Quartararo in Austria and while he admitted he didn’t fully understand his crash, he accepted full responsibility for it.
“It felt good, everything was OK,” said Miller.
“I was struggling a little bit with the grip on the right-hand-side edge from the beginning.
“But I felt really good with the front and was able to push as I liked.
“I was doing my pace and was doing well. Fabio came past, pulled a little bit and then he was starting to drop and I was coming back towards him.
“I was struggling off the edge [of the tyre] so I had to try to get as close as I could to be able to make the pass on the straight from the sacrifice I was having to give on the exit.
“I really have to wait and see the data but everything felt normal. I clearly asked a little bit too much of the front and it disappeared on me.
“It really, really hurt, that one. It stung. Because I essentially had a podium in the pocket but I threw it away.
“I’m very disappointed in myself and sorry for the team.”
In his first season at Ducati’s factory team, Miller had been tipped as a title favourite following strong winter form.
But an underwhelming pair of opening rounds in Qatar followed by a crash in Portugal meant he was a distant 12th in the championship at that stage, already 47 points from leader Quartararo.
He rebounded with back-to-back wins at Jerez and Le Mans that brought him up to fourth in the standings and within 16 points of Quartararo’s lead.
That momentum was then lost, though, and crashing out of both the Assen race before the summer break and today’s event have left him an outsider in the title race.
Miller was running a hard tyre in a race where the medium compound was the more popular choice. But he didn’t feel that led to a loss of temperature that might’ve contributed to the crash.
Though he admitted it was a “borderline” choice that he had been “tentative” about, he felt from using it in practice four on Saturday that the tyre was the advantage that was going to get him ahead of Quartararo’s Yamaha.
“It felt good. Fabio was struggling more with the front tyre when I was behind him. That was my strong point, I felt,” said Miller.
“I think it was just me. He was gaining a little bit on the edge accelerating out of [Turn] 6. I reeled him back in, I was just trying to get right on his arse at 7 to have a lunge into the second-last corner down the hill.
“But as I tipped it in, it just started going on me. There’s that white line that’s been painted black before the corner, and I think it started from there.
“I held it a little bit but just asked too much from the front. I didn’t feel like I did anything different to the laps before, but probably I did, I don’t know.”
The race being stopped and restarted following Dani Pedrosa and Lorenzo Savadori’s big crash had rescued Miller’s chances as he had tumbled down the order at the first start having made a mistake while side by side with Maverick Vinales into the first corner.
It worked the opposite way for team-mate Bagnaia, who had been leading before the red flag but was uncompetitive after the restart.
“The rear of my bike was not working from the restart,” said Bagnaia, who was reluctant to blame a move from the medium to the hard tyre, feeling his loss of pace was not necessarily a tyre problem.
He eventually finished only 11th after a late track limits penalty.
