Alex Marquez reignited his championship challenge with a dominant victory at Jerez, after championship leader team-mate Franco Morbidelli crashed out.
At the start, Morbidelli launched an assault on Marquez into Turn 1, but ran wide and allowed the Spaniard back into the lead. The Marc VDS duo immediately opened up a gap of over a second to the chasing pack, and over the the next handful of laps Morbidelli stalked pole man Marquez.
On the eighth lap of 25, Marquez ran into the right of Turn 5 too hot and let Morbidelli take the lead. He would not be sat behind the Italian for long, however, as disaster soon struck. Seemingly pushing no harder than he had done throughout the race, Morbidelli lost the front of his Marc VDS Kalex at Turn 9 and registered his first DNF of the 2017 season.
This gave Marquez a golden opportunity to tally up his maiden Moto2 win, and he did not waste this chance. He crossed the line 3.5s clear of the field to cut the deficit to Morbidelli in the standings to 26 points.
Behind, Moto2 rookie Francesco Bagnaia moved into third in the early stages of the race and held a hard-charging Mattia Pasini at bay when the Italtrans rider put his inherited second position under threat.
Pasini encountered grip issues in the closing stages, giving Bagnaia a comfortable margin to get across the line with to secure his debut intermediate class podium in just his fourth outing. KTM’s Miguel Oliveira completed the rostrum after scything past Pasini at Turn 9 with five laps to go.
Luca Marini put on a late charge for fourth, but missed out by just 0.093s in fifth. Marcel Schrotter took the chequered flag in a decent sixth on his Dynavolt Kalex, with Dominique Aegerter slipping to seventh having started from the front row.
Tom Luthi’s miserable Spanish Grand Prix weekend concluded with a decent eighth place, which puts him just 11 points off of the championship lead after Morbidelli’s retirement. He led home Yonny Hernandez and Axel Pons.
Lorenzo Baldassarri was a disappointing 11th on the second of the Forward Racing bikes, with Jorge Navarro, Hafizh Syahrin, Ricky Cardus and Tetsuta Nagashima rounding out the final points scoring positions.
