Desalle bouncing on the 3s after Turkish MXGP delight

Crucially for Desalle the points earned under the Afyon sunshine means he guards a cushion of almost 30 over Gajser in his quest for a top three championship result and with just two rounds and a maximum of 100 left on the table.

"I’m really happy with my third podium in a row,” said Desalle. “I didn’t feel so good yesterday because this new track was so fast and we were on the limit but the track developed really well through the weekend; today it was really technical and I felt better every time I rode. The team has been working really hard on small details to get us ever closer to the win but it is not easy against Herlings.”

In MX2 114 Motorsport Honda’s Hunter Lawrence narrowly missed out on his third champagne spray in a row after tying on points with Thomas Kjer Olsen for third place overall but losing out on account of the second moto ranking. The 250 riders put on a dramatic and often-chaotic show with close contest, plastic-scraping and even mid-air crashes between the leaders. Ben Watson used the grunt of the 2019 Yamaha YZ250F to scramble to two 4th positions in the wake of his first ever selection for Team GBR at the upcoming annual curtain-closing MXoN.

MXGP has hit the afterburner in recent weeks with trips to Switzerland, Bulgaria and Turkey and now takes a well-earned respite ahead of the two final jousts of 2018 in Holland and Italy. The permanent, historic and famous motorsport circuits of Assen and Imola will drop the curtain on a long campaign before the attention of the off-road motorcycle racing community turns to RedBud, Michigan for the Monster Energy Motocross of Nations.