Moto3 Aragon Race: Foggia victorious as title contenders crash out

Dennis Foggia won a dramatic Moto3 race as both Acosta and Garcia scored zero points.

Dennis Foggia was able to pull victory out of the bag today, hugely capitalising on crashes from Pedro Acosta and Sergio Garcia to come within 12 points of Garcia in the championship, adding his name into the hat of title contenders. It is also worth noting he has continued his 100% podium or Zero record in 2021, he has scored points in seven races this year taking seven podiums with the last three races taking consecutive podiums.

The race started with many riders being extremely aggressive as you’d expect from Moto3 with Darryn Binder and Pedro Acosta banging handlebars down through the corkscrew which became Acosta’s favoured overtaking spot over the race picking off many riders including Ayumu Sasaki, Darryn Binder and Izan Guevara. A rider who had a superb opening laps and race was Xavier Artigas who came from P12 on the grid to mix it up with the front runners, leading the race at one point and consistently being within the top three, he has plenty of experience here taking two podiums here last year battling against Guevara with a Red Bull Rookies podium to boot in 2018.

Ideally, Artigas was ready to take his second World Championship podium following from a pretty tough rookie season which saw him crash out of the opening three races and miss races due to COVID-19, it would’ve been the perfect way to turn his season around but unfortunately it wasn’t to be, an incredibly aggressive Pedro Acosta would suffer a disastrous low side with Artigas being collected as an innocent victim blotting the copybook of Acosta with his first DNF of the season after a pretty impressive crash-free season so far (aside from Le Mans when he crashed and remounted to take P8).

Acosta crashing out was a godsend for Sergio Garcia, it opened up the doors to hit big and claw back a huge 25 points in the championship fight to drop the lead to around 25 points, completely dismantling the buffer Acosta had and applying the pressure, sadly Garcia also crashed out very late onto the race and finished in P17 with a zero next to his name, there’s no doubt he will have nightmares about that later on.

Joining Foggia on the podium were the Tech3 boys of Deniz Oncu and Ayumu Sasaki who was able to pick off a strong Izan Guevara in the final lap, the race was Oncu’s to win but as we know that Le0pard machine is tuned to pure perfection and was able to rocket its way to P1 and hand Foggia victory. Izan Guevara had a stunning race, the Junior World Champion has been competitive all weekend long including leading this morning’s warm-up session, unfortunately some mistakes and moves from riders such as Niccolo Antonelli ruined his victory chances coming home in a strong P4.

Further down we see Stefano Nepa take a seriously impressive P8 finish on the BOE machine, a seriously underrated rider this year with Jaume Masia rounding out the top 10. We had some pretty stunning stand out rides today with John McPhee’s replacement Syarifuddin Azman finishing in an impressive P13 on debut! Lorenzo Fellon also deserves a shout out, riding within the top 10 aiming for his first points before a long lap penalty demoted him to P15, then a crash with Jeremy Alcoba on the last lap meant he scored zero, despite this it was a majorly impressive ride from the young Frenchman.

Full Results – 

Featured image – MotoGP.com