MotoGP Sepang: McPhee salvages victory from despair

John McPhee went from almost quitting to the top step of the Malaysian Moto3 podium on Sunday after a dramatic fightback from 22nd.

A disastrous weekend, in what has literally been a back-breaking and continuously challenging season, turned on a sixpence on Sunday as McPhee wrestled his Sterilgarda Husqvarna from the eighth row of the Sepang grid to victory with a sensational recovery. Having advanced through the pack to the top five with four to go, the Scotsman continued to stun on the last lap with a move from fifth to first at the penultimate corner, a position he defended until the flag with teammate Ayumu Sasaki second.

“I don’t know what to say,” McPhee admitted as the celebrations subsided. “It has been the toughest season of my career. It’s not been easy. I’ve been underperforming and struggling and not able to get the results I’ve been wanting and especially this weekend has been really, really tough but we worked hard at it. We changed a lot of things, even after warm up, for the race we changed a lot of things and I just had the determination.

“Yesterday I was really, really down about everything. Didn’t really want to even see it through till the end.

“But to be honest, I managed to reset, regroup, come back today and so happy to be there and fighting for the podium. It was a case of ‘win it or bin it’ so happy not to take Ayumu out in the last corner. The best finished to a tough weekend.

“The race for me was quite strange,” he continued. “Like I said, we changed quite a lot for the race so the first few laps, although I was attacking, I was trying to understand what exactly I had as well to fight. Honestly the bike was good today, I rode as hard as I could, the first 10 laps especially, trying to