Paris (AFP) – Defending MotoGP world champion Jorge Martin, who suffered two pre-season crashes, said he hopes to be back for the fourth round of this year’s championship. The Spaniard has missed the opening two rounds and had announced that he would not race in Austin, Texas, on March 29 and 30. The next race is at Lusail, in Qatar on April 12 and 13.
“I expect to be in Qatar, but only if it doesn’t pose any risks,” the Aprilia rider told Italian sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport published on Thursday. But, he added, “these are the timelines, and it would be a mistake to rush them,” which “would risk making everything take even longer.”
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Martin missed almost all of pre-season testing after breaking his right hand and foot in a crash on the opening day of a session in Malaysia. In an update on social media late on Wednesday, he explained that he then suffered a second “big impact” crash training on a supermoto all-terrain racing bike as he prepared to return. Pointing to parts of his anatomy, he listed the injuries as: broken radius and scaphoid bones in his left wrist, four fractures of his left foot, and muscular injuries in his right ribs.
Martin already trails six-time world champion Marc Marquez, who has won both races and both sprints in his first season on a factory Ducati, by 74 points. “Marc winning is not something anyone could not have expected,” Martin told Gazzetta. But the 27-year-old said his recovery was going well. “It was a difficult time but now I start to see the light,” he said on social media.
The Yamaha-Pramac team announced on Thursday that Portuguese rider Miguel Oliveira will miss Austin and be replaced by Spaniard Augusto Fernandez. Oliveira injured his left shoulder in a crash in the Sprint Race in Argentina on March 15 and missed the main race with heavy bruising to his collarbone. His Yamaha-Pramac team said on Thursday that the rider had returned home and “further examinations carried out in Portugal revealed a sternoclavicular dislocation with ligament damage.”
Fernandez, the 2022 Moto2 World Champion, raced in MotoGP for two seasons with the French GasGas-Tech3 team before becoming a reserve rider for Yamaha this year.
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