Andrea Dovizioso has suggested his MotoGP World Championship title rival Marc Marquez deserves credit for getting back on his bike and lapping fast just hours after a violent accident that left him nursing leg and back pain.
Marquez crashed heavily during FP1 for the Thailand MotoGP, the champion-elect suffering a high-speed accident and heavy impact on the ground that necessitated him to be stretchered to the medical centre and then taken to hospital.
Despite nursing back and leg pain, however, Marquez was back on the Honda hours later in FP2 and lapping quickly again, a feat that did not go unnoticed during the session as Danilo Petrucci gestured a thumbs up to him on track.
Indeed, Dovizioso would go on to suggest he was impressed with Marquez’s resolve to get back down to business after shrugging off his evident discomfort but did so by candidly pointing out there are others that would have attempted to use it as an excuse to explain slow performances.
“There are two types of riders,” he told Visordown’s sister publication Crash.net. “Some riders stay behind a painful or bad situation. Most of the riders put the limit in front of everybody and play on that. So they speak always, ‘I have this [injury], I have this, I have this.’
“Some do the opposite – they don’t say the [real] things so they don’t show the limit. And they push 100 percent. Marc is one of them. There are some other riders doing that.”
Who is Andrea Dovizioso referring to?
Though Dovizioso doesn’t name any examples of whom he classifies in this category, one could suggest he is pointing to Marquez’s own team-mate Jorge Lorenzo, who says his back injury is the primary reason for his lack of performance on the same machine at the moment.
“Especially with the media a lot of riders complain about a lot of things but they are smaller than the reality. But for the media it’s nice to say that or push on that. There are a lot of riders doing that. Marc is different for sure. But he’s not the only one.”
Dovizioso himself has been on the receiving end of a painful accident this season following a crash at Silverstone that briefly caused him some memory loss.
Requiring a visit to the hospital too, Dovizioso was nonetheless back out on the Ducati later in the week when he participated in testing at Misano.
Those who says there is a ‘best bike’ is “stupid”
For a rider not known for his cutting statements in the media, Dovizioso – who was eighth quickest in free practice in Buriram – took offence at a question that suggested Yamaha may have the best bike on the grid after its 1-2-3 showing in FP2, branding the comparisons as ‘stupid’.
“I’m a rider, I can know more than the media about the best bike,” he responded. “But for me it’s impossible to say which is the best bike. And who speaks about the best bike, I think is not smart enough because it’s impossible to know exactly which is the best bike.
“First it’s always a mix between the rider and the bike. The bike doesn’t win alone. The rider doesn’t win alone. For example, Marc. For sure is he the best rider at this moment? Maybe yes. But that bike with Marc works. With other riders it doesn’t work. But the other riders aren’t bad
“To speak about the Yamaha in this case or a lot of people in the last two years spoke about the Ducati I think is stupid.”
