Ducati MotoGP factory riders Marc Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia had their Czech Grand Prix sprint rides compromised by the threat of a tyre pressure penalty - but in two completely different ways.
Marquez and Bagnaia ran a comfortable 1-2 out front in the early going, but both deliberately dropped back to let other riders past in order to artificially spike their front tyre pressures in the slipstream.
Both riders felt in the moment this was the only way to adhere to the requirement of spending at least three laps at above the required minimum front tyre pressure. Non-compliance would've resulted in an eight-second penalty, very significant in a 10-lap race.
Marquez managed to duck in behind KTM's Pedro Acosta and repass him to win the race, but Bagnaia's race was doomed once he had dropped behind Acosta.
He limped home in seventh place, then found out something galling after the finish.
Bagnaia appears to have been riding to a target that wasn't real.
"Honestly, I am not the right one to be answering to the question of what happened to me," he said.
"But unluckily I'm the only one who needs to put the face [in front of the media]. I was there, just trying to manage the situation, after I was seeing that my front tyre pressure wasn't going over the limit - and I was there, trying to put load on the front.
"I didn't [generate enough pressure], so I let Pedro pass in the wrong position - I wasn't expecting Enea [Bastianini] and he overtook me with a contact, and Fabio [Quartararo] overtook me. I completely messed the situation.
"And then I wasn't able to get the pressure up. I stayed behind there, following others, to get the pressure up.
"But I didn't, so I was sure, 100%, that I would get the penalty. Then I arrived to the box, I looked to the screen, I saw that I wasn't under investigation.
"I checked the telemetry, I saw that from the second lap I was over the limit. So, honestly, I had a dashboard problem. It happened, normally it doesn't have to happen - but in my situation this season it can happen."
Asked by The Race whether Ducati explained to him how something like this could happen, Bagnaia said: "My team knows. It's better to ask an engineer."
He indicated that there was a pre-race electronics problem that required some last-second work, and that this could have been a factor in disrupting the programming.
And Ducati has emphasised that rather than a wrong setting being input as a result of human error, it was specifically a glitch on the dashboard that meant the tyre pressure alarm was 'stuck on' despite there being no grounds for it to be on.
While Bagnaia wasn't announced, much to his shock, as being under investigation post-race, his team-mate was.
But Marquez had been confident on the bike that he had done enough to get the tyre pressure in the right window with how he managed the race - so was surprised to discover there had been any doubt once he arrived to the post-sprint celebrations.
An investigation of this nature in MotoGP usually means a penalty is much more likely than not, but Marquez - alongside Ai Ogura and Alex Rins - were cleared of any breach very quickly.
MotoGP explained afterwards: "The post-race investigation into the tyre pressures for riders #93, #42 and #79 quickly revealed an incorrect minimum pressure setting in the race direction warning system. Therefore no further action nor investigation was necessary. All riders complied with the correct minimum pressure.
"This control system is separate to any warning system used by teams and is not visible to teams or riders during the session. Each team controls their own parameters and the warnings sent [to] their riders' dashboards regarding minimum tyre pressures."
While 1.8bar is the baseline limit of front tyre pressure, it is tweaked from race to race - which is perhaps an explanation for how something like this could've happened.
But Marquez made it clear afterwards that, unlike for Bagnaia, it was indeed marginal to get his front tyre in the right pressure window.
"The thing is that this is competition, and in some race tracks the engineers always try to be at the edge of the limits because [by doing that] we have a bit more performance sometimes," he said. "Not always, but sometimes. Sometimes we want to increase the pressure a bit more because it helps in other aspects.
"Yesterday we didn't ride in the dry, and the new surface is super good, a lot of grip, but we're riding in a different way [to before]. The rear grip is almost too much, and then you cannot force the front [and put load into it to raise the pressure].
"All these things make the life of the engineers a bit more difficult. I appreciate them because they're always trying to find the best, when the easy thing for them is to increase the pressure [and make the rider cope with it]."
Marquez said he noticed on the fourth lap that he wasn't in the right pressure range. He "pushed super hard on the brakes" for one lap to try to spike it, but that wasn't getting the job done - so he dropped behind Acosta, who admitted afterwards he was always certain Marquez was going to go back past at some point.
Marquez said of his arrival to the celebrations: "Now I understand why they [Ducati] were like this.
"I was quiet and happy, and they were excited [agitated] and nervous. I was under investigation and I didn’t realise.
"I thought everything was OK, but he [Gigi Dall'Igna, Ducati tech chief] was asking me if I was inside [the limit], and the dashboard said yes!"
