BRNO MOTOGP was plagued with a bout of crashes during Saturday practice, qualifying and Sunday's race, with a few A-list racers joining the action.
Both Rossi and Lorenzo crashed, lucky to escape injury, at the end of qualifying. The Fiat Yamaha pair were promptly joined by Alvaro Bautista and Nicky Hayden; Bautista crashed in the morning, and though initial diagnosis of a cracked vertebra was contradicted by a CT scan, he was not able to ride in the afternoon qualifying session. He still raced on Sunday having previously set a fast enough time.
Hayden fell in the afternoon, trapping his left wrist under the bike, resulting in a chip of bone off the end of the radius at the top of the wrist.
“I already have a screw in there, but for now it looks as though the scaphoid is okay,” said the Ducati rider.
Rossi was uncharacteristically angry after his low-speed spill at Brno's penultimate corner, but said later: “It was the right place to fall off, because it was slow and I didn’t touch my injured right leg.”
But team-mate Lorenzo was probably the luckiest crasher of the weekend. The Spaniard's M1 engine remained undamaged in his qualifying high-speed spill, which saw Lorenzo's bike cartwheel the fencing. A loss of an engine could mean he will not finish the season on the six allotted motors.
