There were 38 minutes remaining in FP2 of the Portuguese Grand Prix, held in heavy rain, when the Italian rider’s Ducati lost vertical and crawled at full speed towards the turn 3 run-off, where it hit the gravel and began to spin around on itself and being, apparently, quite touched.
Pecco Bagnaia got up, took a look at his bike and when he saw that he couldn’t get it back at the moment, he bent down and grabbed a handful of gravel from the Portimao circuit with both hands. He went to the road, where he was picked up by a scooter that took him to the box, where the team manager, Davide Tardozzi , was waiting for him, to whom he handed over the gravel.
“It was a symbolic action,” he later explained to the media. “In the crash we had the bike was very destroyed because the gravel is too big, it’s not like the standard gravel that we should have on all tracks,” he added.
“It is something that we have to talk about in the safety commission. For our safety, and for that of our bikes as well, the normal thing would be to have smoother and smaller gravel.”
Pecco recalled that in Mandalika they had “also this same problem”, and added Jerez to the circuits that, in his opinion, should change the gravel.
“We already complained last year when [Jorge] Martín suffered a very strong crash here in the escape route,” recalled the Italian.
Precisely, Motorsport.com asked Jorge Martín about the action of taking the gravel to the box and his opinion about the dangerousness of the size of the stones in the run-offs.
“I have not seen anything, but I already said it last year when I had the fall, that the gravel here is very, very large, more than normal, they are stones, it is not gravel, and when you fall you hurt yourself a lot. I guess he did it for that,” Martin explained.
“When I said it last year, people laughed, maybe now that it has been seen on television they will do something. I think they should change it, it is an issue that we should talk about in the Security Commission,” Terminator recommended.
