After the injury that kept him away from pre-season testing, Franco Morbidelli will finally return to the track this weekend at the Qatar GP. A small clot in his head forced the Prima Pramac rider to miss the Sepang and Losail tests, as well as affecting his training.
On the eve of the season’s opening round, #21 ensured that he is feeling well and is aware that he needs to take it easy at the beginning since he will have to adapt: ‘I’m feeling very good. It was a particular pre-season for me without testing – this year that test would probably be the most important of all the years that I’ve been in MotoGP because it’s a completely new bike and it’s a particularly high competition championship. But that’s the situation and now we are going to recover from it in the best way, which is to take it calmly in the early stages and try to keep the rhythm low at least outside the track and don’t stress too much if the things are not coming. Because we know that I need to learn a lot of things in this small amount of time’.
Even absent from the tracks, Morbidelli managed to do some preparation with Pramac, as he explained: ‘It was very easy to understand that the bike is unbelievable and fantastic. The work I’ve done at home was to stay attached to the sessions and to the bikes as much as I could even if I was at home. And also, even if I was recovering and healing an injury, I had the chance to come here, to follow the tests and to see live what was going on, the level of the bikes and everybody. When I was at home I could speak with my crew chief, Massimo [Branchini], a lot of time about the bikes. So I spent a good amount of time talking about bikes even if I was not there’.
This was a very different and serious injury that the Italian doesn’t want to have again, and it affected his training: ‘I’ve been able to do the maximum that I could do recovering from this injury, which is pretty serious and you need to respect a lot, you need to take it easy on the effort you make when you make cardio exercices. I couldn’t actually make any running, for example. I did the maximum that I could according to the injury that I had’.
Now fully recovered and without the need for caution, Morbidelli admitted that there were worse aspects of the injury than feeling physically fit and still having to take many precautions: ‘There were worse parts in this injury, much worse. For example the story of it. I spoke with Marc [Márquez] and he told me how he found me on track and what was going on. There were worse scenes of this injury. The happy part of it is that nothing that everybody was affraid was going to happen, happened. Thanks God! And the happy part was to recover from it and try to prepare a season on the best bike that I could prepare a season on’.