WINNER of Sunday's Barcelona MotoGP, Dani Pedrosa has been sidelined for 48 hours after a huge crash yesterday during the first day of the two-day test in Spain.
Both Pedrosa and team-mate Nicky Hayden had planned to spend the day comparing the RC212V spring-valve and pneumatic-valve engines. After a minor fault halted one session Pedrosa went back out on track and suffered the highside, landing heavily on his back.
He was taken to Barcelona´s Dexeus hospital where x-rays confirmed that he has no broken bones, but he has bruised his back and has been ordered to lay-up for 48 hours signalling the end of his testing duties today at the circuit.
Speaking to motogp.com, Pedrosa said: "The crash happened while I was changing direction in the first chicane. It was a highside and I fell quite heavily. My back and my shoulders hurt. I crashed at the start of my second lap of that run, maybe because the tyres weren´t fully up to temperature. When I fell I was doing some tyre testing with the standard engine. I only did ten laps with the pneumatic-valve engine so it's still too early to give any comments."
Hayden added: "It went smooth today. We tried the new bike, my feeling with it was good, it had some good points. But we need more time to check the bike in a long distance situation. We tried some general setting things with it, and we only using race tyres, seeing what kind of endurance we could get because we had some problems with set-up during the weekend wearing the tyres more than we liked. We´ll run with it more tomorrow and maybe try a new chassis"
