Brad Binder has offered a sincere apology to his KTM Factory Racing team after losing a top three result in the MotoGP Dutch TT at Assen for the second successive day.

The South African enjoyed one of his most competitive weekends of the season after qualifying fifth and finishing third across the line in both the Sprint Race and the full-length Grand Prix.

However, on each occasion he fell foul of stewards for stray off-line towards the end of both races on the exit of Turn 8, earning him a penalty that dropped him down the order in the post-race classification.

With his Sprint Race error - which occurred on the penultimate lap - proving his third strike of the race, he was given the standard three-second penalty that took him from third to fifth. HIs main GP violation on the final lap, however, carried an automatic one place demotion to drop him from third to fourth.

>>> 2023 MotoGP World Championship standings <<<

Accepting the punishment as his own error, Binder was more upset for the team for letting two top three finishes go astray

“To be honest, for myself I can deal with it but I feel sorry for my entire team. They worked really hard all weekend, they gave me a bike I could qualify well on, my start was insane, somehow we managed to make the soft tyre work until the end. We should have had two podiums.

“I don’t know what I was doing, I didn’t realise I touched it again. I saw on the replay and was like, f******k, please don’t let that be the loss. Sorry to my team, I’ve got to look at the positives, we were competitive all weekend.

“Aleix came past and pointed at the screen, and I was thinking, I wasn’t quite sure and then I looked at the screen and saw the camera was following me and I thought ‘that’s not good’. For me it’s one thing to deal with it, but it’s the bigger picture, the whole team, I’m sorry.”

Despite the mistakes, Binder has risen back to fourth place in the overall standings heading into the summer break.