Jorge Lorenzo immediately dropped to last position off the start at Sunday’s grand prix in Argentina after mistakingly engaging the pit limiter, cutting majority of power from his Repsol Honda RC213V.

Instantly regretting the error, the three-time MotoGP world champion pushed on, clawing his way back to 12th – the exact same position he started from in the 25-lap encounter.

“Here with the pit limiter, that looks like I pressed it unconsciously because I remember just pressing the start procedure button,” Lorenzo recalled to motorsport.com.

“Suddenly the bike, the rpm goes down like [it had] no fuel and I didn’t know what was going on, but looks like the button of the pit start was on and the bike didn’t go, so everyone overtook me – I was last position again like in Qatar.

“When I started to recover positions, I felt I was missing some rubber in the handlebar in the left, was coming out, out, out and I was with no rubber in my left hand. So no grip at all – everything [was] bad.

“A very difficult race to recover positions, also the track grip was very bad after the Moto2 race and with hotter conditions, so it was like a nightmare. Hopefully in the future these kinds of strange things and unlucky things will not happen again.”

A challenging start to his maiden campaign with the Repsol Honda outfit, Lorenzo sits 14th in the championship rankings after two rounds.