Marquez cleared by stewards after Rins investigation

At the end of FP3 Rins found himself outside of the top 10 on combined times, needed to secure a direct passage into the pole shootout session in qualifying.

Pushing on his final effort to try and lift himself out of 12th, Rins came across a slowing Marquez through Turn 4 and on the racing line into the Sito Pons right-hander of Turn 5 - with the Suzuki forced to pull up.

Visibly frustrated, Rins bailed at the end of his final effort, which was registered as a 1m40.5 following a lap of 1m37s, while laptime analysis provided by MotoGP shows Marquez's last lap was a 1m44.480s.

MotoGP confirmed the investigation via social media with this brief statement: "Incident involving MotoGP riders #93 [Marc Marquez] and #42 [Alex Rins] in FP3 is under investigation."

Rins missed out on an automatic Q2 place by just over a tenth of a second and will face the first part of qualifying this afternoon, while Marquez ended FP3 fourth overall.

Marquez risked a three-place grid penalty, but was ultimately cleared by the MotoGP stewards.

The Honda rider did get penalised last year at the Circuit of the Americas, when he accidentally impeded Yamaha's Maverick Vinales while he was on a flying lap.

Fabio Quartararo topped this morning's FP3 session with a new lap record of 1m36.806s on the Petronas SRT Yamaha, with Pramac's Jack Miller and the second Suzuki of Joan Mir trailing the Frenchman.