Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa retired from today’s Motegi MotoGP with serious rear tyre issues that put paid to any chance of him challenging for the 2017 title.

The little Spaniard will now discuss the problems and study data with his Michelin technician to find out what went wrong with the extra-soft rear he used, given the same compound took Danilo Petrucci to the podium in Japan.

“It’s been a very difficult day and I'm really disappointed as there was a great opportunity to have a nice race. We have improved so much during the free practice sessions, from FP1 to yesterday, but it isn’t clear what happened with the rear tyre today in the race,” said Pedrosa.

“At the beginning the rear tyre spun a lot and I lost a lot of traction which prevented me from opening the throttle on the straight. This issue continued to persist and halfway through the race it became worse and worse. I tried everything to make the bike work but it was almost impossible to ride in these conditions.

“I lost so much time and when I finally dropped out of the points I took the decision to retire, rather than crash. With so much water on track I didn’t expect to have problems with the extra soft rear tire and in fact Petrucci used the same one and he ended up on the podium. We will study together with Michelin the data and try to avoid it from happening again.”