Honda rider Marquez forced Espargaro off the track with an aggressive lunge at the original start of the race at Turn 1 before it was red flagged because of a violent accident between Espargaro’s Aprilia teammate Lorenzo Savadori and KTM wildcard Dani Pedrosa.
Espargaro expressed his anger at Marquez on her lap under red flags in the pits before the two touched again when restarting at Turn 1 – the Aprilia driver had to go off the track again.
He eventually retired with an engine problem but was furious at the way the stewards handled the situation without blaming Marquez for “overtaking him in every race”.
“I’m not going to blame him about Marquez, I mean, there’s no point, Marc is Marc,” he said. “In every race he overtakes from the last 10 years.
“What I want to blame is the stewards panel. I don’t know, maybe you were watching the last few days of the Olympics.
“Marquez decided what to do in the race, anyone can do what they want, but the stewards have to punish.
“I mean, there was no room at all, he hit me very hard on the arm, especially in the first one, and I was off track.
“It was lucky because [Alex] Rins was there and I could have made a mess there.
“And in the second it’s the same, I mean, let’s see if the race management does something, because if you see such an action, punish you, that’s it.
“That’s why we have the rules. But what makes me very angry is that if a rider takes another crash, we punish, but what we have to punish is the action – the result doesn’t matter.
“If I meet Rins today and we both crash, it would be a crash.
“But because nobody fell, we have no penalty. Why do we have the stewards panel for this? We don’t need it. “
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Espargaro also lamented a lack of communication between the stewards and drivers, calling it “a war we cannot win”.
“I don’t understand anything about your job, there is no communication between the drivers and the stewards panel,” he added.
“We accuse them, every single driver, in the security commission, but they are not there, we cannot speak to them, nobody understands the punishments. It’s frustrating, but it’s a war we can’t win. “
Marquez will announce his version of the events to the media at 6:20 p.m. local time.