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| Race 5 of 15 races in the 2020 Grand Prix motorcycle racing season | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Date | 16 August 2020 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Official name | myWorld Motorrad Grand Prix von Österreich | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Location | Red Bull Ring Spielberg, Styria, Austria | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 2020 Austrian motorcycle Grand Prix was the fifth round of the 2020 Grand Prix motorcycle racing season and the fourth round of the 2020 MotoGP World Championship. It was held at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg on 16 August 2020. Brad Binder was the defending MotoGP race winner who aimed for his second consecutive Grand Prix win, having won his and KTM's first race at the previous round.
Andrea Dovizioso was the defending race winner, having won the race in 2019.[1][2][3] The race was won by Ducati rider Andrea Dovizioso with Joan Mir in second for Suzuki, his first podium in MotoGP, while Jack Miller finished third for Pramac Racing.
The race day was notable for an unprecedented series of accidents in the MotoGP and Moto2 category respectively. On lap 4 of the Moto2 race, Enea Bastianini, who was fifth at the moment, suffered a huge highside on the exit of turn 1. Several backmarkers behind Bastianini were able to avoid hitting his stranded bike, which was laying across the circuit on the approach to the back straight into turn 2. However, Hafizh Syahrin, who was running in seventeenth at the moment, came out of the slipstream of Jake Dixon and hit Bastianini's bike at over 200 kph within fractions of a second. Syahrin then was sent airborne as a result of the accident and landed a further fifty metres ahead of the circuit. Edgar Pons and Andi Farid Izdihar were also involved in this accident. Syahrin was taken to the medical center with the suspicion of a leg injury and was therefore ruled out of the Styrian GP for the upcoming weekend at the same venue.
The second crash occurred on lap 9 of the MotoGP race involving Johann Zarco and Franco Morbidelli, who came together on the approach to turn 3. By making contact with each other, Morbidelli and Zarco each fell off their bikes, with Morbidelli's bike sliding across the grass on the outside of the track in full speed, then slightly taking-off before somersaulting multiple times and then flying straight back on track onto the apex of turn 3 and narrowly missing out both Yamaha factory riders Maverick Viñales and Valentino Rossi in the process, who were running in sixth and seventh place respectively. After missing both, the bike itself somersaulted a further multiple times before it came to a rest on the tarmac run-off completely destroyed. Zarco's bike however tangentially hit the safer barrier at high-speed and flew above the circuit also narrowly missing out Viñales and suffered extremely terminal damage such as Morbidelli's wrecked bike.
Both races were immediately red-flagged due to respective track-cleaning actions.