Watch: MotoGP polesitter starts race by erm... running away from pole

Let me let you in on a little TopGear.com secret. Every so often we spot something fantastic over the weekend and think 'Wow, I’ve got to write about that on Monday!'

This weekend that something was Marc Marquez catching a huge Buckaroo moment on the first lap of the Americas GP sprint, dropping him from the lead to third for all of one corner before powering back to the front. Ay caramba!

Or, at least it was. But then something even more bonkers happened: sitting on pole for the start of the grand prix on Sunday, the six-time MotoGP champion eyed the sunshine breaking out from behind the clouds… and without warning he legged it from the grid.

A sudden and impossible-to-ignore call to nature? Nope, the Ducati rider had seen the track was drying fast enough for slick tyres, and so he abandoned his wet weather-shod bike and made a mad dash for the garage.

And then several of his rivals followed suit. Cue total chaos as a grand total of 10 riders all bolted back to the pits, causing mayhem and confusion along the grid and in the pit lane.

With so many headless chickens running amok, the stewards decided they had no choice but to red flag the start, and later on the race got underway in the original grid order with no penalties dished out because the situation was so unprecedented. Wow.

Have you ever seen anything like it? Surely not since the very last Le Mans start in 1969… click these words to watch the drama unfold.