Britain’s Cal Crutchlow suffered his first non-finish of the MotoGP today when a braking error saw him lose the front and crash out with 21 laps left to run.

The CWM LCR Honda man had set a blistering time in qualifying to start from the top of row two but, like Marc Marquez and Scott Redding, struggled early on to make the soft-compund front tyre work.

“I made a mistake. It seems Marc and I had a real problem with the front tyre, we couldn’t get into the corner at all so we were losing a lot of time at the start of the race,” said Crutchlow, speaking at the track.

“I simply grabbed the brake and my foot fell off the peg when I tried to go for the rear brake. It jolted the bike and as that happened I grabbed the front brake. It was a stupid mistake. I would have been pleased with a decent result today but it wasn’t to be. Bit disappointing and frustrating with the first DNF of the year and it doesn’t feel very good.”