Source: Supplied.

Repsol Honda’s Marc Marquez was able to increase his lead in the 2016 MotoGP World Championship after splashing to a calculated second position behind first-time winner Jack Miller in a wild Dutch TT.

Marquez displayed significant patience in the two-part race, initially fourth in the first phase before capitlising on the 12-lap restart to claim a pivotal runner-up behind Australia’s Miller.

“Today’s race was one of those in which you can either lose many points or gain them and you can face it with two mentalities – either you take a risk to gain a bigger advantage, or you focus on finishing the race in order to lose the fewest points possible,” Marquez said.

“The latter is the mentality that the team repeated to me about 40 times between this morning and today and it is exactly what I did. I tried to stay in the top five so as not to drop many points to Valentino [Rossi] and attempted to not make mistakes in order to finish the race.

“At the beginning of the first race I didn’t feel comfortable and lost touch, but then I was able to recover. I think that stopping the race was a good decision, because it was very dangerous out there.

“In the second race I started off thinking about pushing a bit more, but everyone was very fast and I decided not to follow Rossi and Dovizioso because they were going too quickly. However, both of them crashed later on.

“When I saw Jack [Miller] stalking behind me, I knew that he would be going for his first win so I preferred to let him pass and keep a couple of seconds gap between us, as well as a cushion to third place. I did that because with Jorge [Lorenzo] so far back and Rossi out of the race, second place was as good as a victory. In the end, we leave Assen with a bigger lead.”

The podium result, in which he was joined by the unlikely combination of Marc VDS Honda’s Miller and Pramac Ducati’s Scott Redding, sees Marquez stretch a 24-point lead in the standings over Yamaha’s defending champion Jorge Lorenzo and a further 18 over Rossi.