Marc Marquez has been awarded a 16-second time penalty in the MotoGP Dutch TT for an illegal front tyre pressure.

Marquez finished the Assen race in fifth place, but his route there was a strange one. He made his way up to third place early on, but was unable to match the pace of the two leaders, eventual winner Francesco Bagnaia and current championship leader Jorge Martin.

On lap eight, Marquez waved through Fabio Di Giannantonio and slotted in behind in fourth place.

After the race, Marquez revealed that this was because he knew he had a tyre pressure set to run behind other bikes, and that the number of laps he had run in clean air, multiple second behind Martin, meant he was close to the limit of the amount of the race he could run with the front tyre below the minimum limit for the front tyre pressure of 1.80 bar.

Each MotoGP rider must complete at least 60 per cent of the laps of any full-distance race with the tyre pressure above the minimum, and Marquez said after the race that he had been under the limit by 0.01 bar on one lap too many. The result was the 16-second penalty – as is standard for breaching the front tyre pressure regulation in a full-distance Sunday race – that drops him from fourth in the final standings to 10th, costing him seven points.

Marquez said that he realised from lap five, three laps before he let Di Giannantonio through, that he would have to manage his front tyre pressure throughout the race to stay legal, but that he “did not expect” a move from Enea Bastianini that pushed him into the run-off area on the outside of turn one and left him with a gap in front of him to the group he and Bastianini were battling in.

“What I didn’t expect was the contact from [Enea] Bastianini that pushed me out of the track,” Marquez told MotoGP.com. “Unluckily, on that lap, I didn’t push well in the first sector, and the tyre pressure started to drop again and takes two-to-three laps to come back.”

Despite the penalty, Marquez remains third in the championship, six points ahead of Enea Bastianini, who now has two podiums in the last two Grands Prix, but 48 points behind Francesco Bagnaia, who has won each of the last five races including Sprints, and 58 behind current championship leader Jorge Martin.