MotoGP, what a scare in Barcelona
Due to the injury sustained at Le Mans, Marc Marquez missed the Montmeló event. He couldn’t have known it in France, but he avoided participating in one of the scariest weekends in recent years, with two very serious injuries to his brother Alex and to Johann Zarco, who might have to wait a long time before returning to the track.
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The Spaniard is a fighter, and he will be back in action at Mugello despite having a brace on his right foot following a fracture of the fifth metatarsal. Of course, even he cannot close his eyes to the safety issue, which came back into focus on the Catalan Sunday. Marquez’s recipe to reduce the risk of accidents is very practical: reduce the GPs and streamline a calendar that last year reached 22 weekends (thus 44 races), and with the arrival of Liberty Media it could even expand.
Marquez’s words
“The risk will always be there, but 44 races with these bikes is not the best way to minimize it; they are good for the show, and I understand that, but we riders are the ones who put on the show on the track, so we are running a high risk“, this was his comment to journalists, including FormulaPassion correspondent at Mugello, Matteo Senatore. “Usually all dangerous situations happen in the first lap or the first laps, when the group is large. And then in the end we are human beings. It is not easy to face a weekend where you not only ride a bike, which is risky and demanding, but when we leave the box we talk for two and a half hours straight about different things; this will not change if the riders do not unite“.
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Marquez also explained his feelings after seeing his brother Alex hit Pedro Acosta and crash badly at very high speed on the Montmeló straight leading to turn 10: “Alex’s first week was tough, I went to pick him up at the airport on Monday, we arrived at his home and after two hours his girlfriend called me, saying he was really unwell and that we had to do something. He started feeling pain again and we went back to the hospital, where he stayed for two days. When I saw the footage at home I was ‘paralyzed’: we know well that the risk is always there, but when it happens to someone in your family or to riders you are very close to, the impact is even stronger. Sunday I suffered a lot, also because I know that in this type of accidents sometimes the damage shows up later. On Monday I gave him a big hug. Not only him, but also Johann was very lucky, the whole MotoGP family was. We have to remind everyone that we are human beings, we are riders, we are in competition, but life comes first“.
