The delay in cancelling Marc Marquez’s MotoGP Japane🔜se Grand Prix pole lap has been blamed on a software glitch.

The Gresini rider set a 1m42.868s in the closing stages of Q2 on Saturday morning at Motegi to take provisional pole, ꧑but had the lap cancelled for exceeding track limits.

However, the lap didn’🌟t come off the board until after the chequered flag was flown, which meant he had no time to try for another time🐷 and was dumped to ninth on the grid.

The Gresini team w🎃as furious with this in its garage, while Marquez replied to a MotoGP social media post about him exceeding track limits with:♛ “Agreed [with the penalty] but… the notification times are the notification times.”

While the initial stewards’ document for Saturday’s incidents did not offer an explanatio🥂n on the Marquez situation, a later update revealed a software glitch was to꧒ blame.

“The MotoGP stewards investigated a delayed track limits application concern꧋ing Marc Marquez,” the brief statement 🀅read.

“This was determined to be due to a sof🉐tware glitch and the 🌱lap was therefore manually cancelled.”

Marquez told TNT Sport on the matter: “Yeah, of course this morning was a bit 🧸confusing, especially for that late notification because on the bike it’s impossible to realise if you touch the green sometimes or not.

“Then I saw the lap was not cancelled, so I said ‘Ok, there’s 🌠♒no point to pushing more’, because there were some drops [of rain].

“So I said with that lap time I’ll be on the front row, which was theౠ target.

“U꧙nfortunately for us, there was that very late notification.

“The stewards told me that they🧸 had problems with the connections.

“Unlucky, but it i꧋s what it is. The jo𓄧b was try to forget that, concentrate on the sprint race and we did our best one more time.”

Marquez came throu🔴gh to fourth in the early laps of the sprint and was promoted to thi🌟rd when Pedro Acosta crashed out of the lead.

He battled hardℱ with Enea Bastianini for second in the latter stages, but had𝔉 to concede defeat to the factory Ducati rider.

“It’s trueဣ that in those first laps I was pushing a bit t🍃oo much and then I overheated the front tyre,” he added.

“Then I cooled down a bit to try to understand where I was, but then in the last laps I was catching them and I was s💖tarting to ride in a very good way.

“In that fight with Enea, in that last lap he defended super good and it ꧟was too much risk [to pass him]. I tried, because I try, but he defended in a very good way.”