After the injury that kept him out of 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 Pramac rider to miss the Sepang and Losail tests, as well as affecting his training.
On the eve of the season opener, #21 ensured that he is feeling good and is aware that he needs to take it easy at the beginning as he will have to adapt: ‘I’m feeling very good. It was a particular pre-season for me without testing – this year when the tests would probably be the most important of all the years I’ve been in MotoGP because it’s a completely new bike and a particularly high competition championship. But that’s the situation and now we will recover in the best way, which is to take it easy in the initial phase and try to keep the pace low at least off the track and not stress too much if things are not going well. Because we know that I need to learn many things in this short period of time‘.
Even absent from the track, 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 did at home was to keep up with the sessions and the bike as much as I could even while at home. And also, even though I was recovering and healing from an injury, I had the chance to come here, follow the tests, and see live what was happening, the level of the bikes and everyone. When I was at home, I could talk to my chief mechanic, Massimo [Branchini], a lot about bikes. So, I spent a good amount of time talking about bikes even if I wasn’t there‘.
This was a very different and serious injury, one that the Italian does not want to have again, and that affected his training: ‘I was able to do the most I could to recover from this injury, which is very serious and you need to respect a lot, you need to go easy on the effort you make when doing aerobic exercises. In fact, I couldn’t run, for example. I did the most I could according to the injury I had‘.
Now fully recovered and without the need to be cautious, 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 to this injury, much worse. For example, the story of it. I talked to Marc [Márquez] and he told me how he found me on the track and what was happening. There were worse things about this injury. The happy part is that none of the things everyone feared would happen actually happened. Thank God! And the happy part was recovering from it and trying to prepare for a season on the best bike I could prepare for a season‘.
