until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
Last year’s MotoGP world champion Fabio Quartararo has broken his left hand in a training fall from his motocross bike.
The Yamaha rider revealed on a social media post. He won’t need surgery to recover from the injury ahead of the resumption of on-track preparations for the 2023 season in eight weeks’ time.
“Yesterday I had a crash during my motocross training, and I suffered a little fracture on my left hand,” Quartararo wrote. “No surgery needed, time to recover.”
It’s the second time in just under two months that he has damaged his left hand, having also fractured a finger in a crash during the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend.
Yesterday I had a crash during my motocross training and I suffer a little fracture on my left hand.
No surgery needed, time to recover pic.twitter.com/43s3EX6IHn— Fabio Quartararo (@FabioQ20) December 12, 2022
Happening only 10 days into the enforced two-month testing ban, it’s perhaps the best time for him to sustain such an injury, with his next time on track with the factory Yamaha M1 not coming until well into next year, when the series heads to Sepang on February 10 to kick off the first of two pre-season tests.
Quartararo has traditionally not been a rider who trains extensively with motorcycles, unlike some of his peers – many of whom have missed not just winter training time but significant amounts of races as well due to injuries from training crashes.
His team-mate Franco Morbidelli, for example, missed out on a large chunk of the 2021 season after badly damaging his knee while riding at mentor Valentino Rossi’s flat track ranch, while other rivals including Marc Marquez and Jack Miller have also hurt themselves away from their MotoGP machines.
However, with multiple instances of arm pump problems in recent seasons, most notably when the issue cost him a victory at Jerez last season (an incident that immediately forced him to have surgery to attempt to cure the issue), it may be that Quartararo’s changing how he prepares himself for 2023 as he tries to regain the crown he lost to Ducati rider Pecco Bagnaia in 2022.
The rigours of riding more aggressive and intense forms of motorcycles like motocross have long been one of the ways in which riders have attempted to alleviate issues with swelling arm muscles without resorting to surgery, with 2023 Repsol Honda rider Joan Mir recently speculating that his unexpected incidence of arm pump at Sepang this year may have been down to a lack of time riding as he recovered from other injuries.
“Normally during the season I do a lot of motocross, dirt-track,” he explained. “I’m able to train with a lot of bikes. In the previous months I was not able even to train with the motorbike. This for sure maybe created a bit the problem.”
