Quartararo shakes off neck pain to lead Petronas Yamaha 1-2

Fabio Quartararo says he’s recovered from his first-corner crash at the British MotoGP and enjoyed getting to grips with Misano on his Petronas Yamaha as he led a team 1-2 on the opening day of the test.

After his heavy fall on Sunday at Silverstone, which also took out Ducati’s Andrea Dovizioso, Quartararo was taken to hospital as a precaution for dizziness and a headache.

Quartararo shakes off neck pain to lead Petronas Yamaha 1-2

Fabio Quartararo says he’s recovered from his first-corner crash at the British MotoGP and enjoyed getting to grips with Misano on his Petronas Yamaha as he led a team 1-2 on the opening day of the test.

After his heavy fall on Sunday at Silverstone, which also took out Ducati’s Andrea Dovizioso, Quartararo was taken to hospital as a precaution for dizziness and a headache.

But having been passed fit to ride despite small neck pain, Quartararo quickly got to work and up to speed at Misano to top the times during a late qualifying simulation in which he produced a best lap time of 1m 32.996s to edge out team-mate Franco Morbidelli by just 0.023s.

Quartararo has reflected on an productive opening test day focusing on bike setup at Misano after battling through some neck pain from his Silverstone crash last weekend.

“Today has been really positive as we did many laps, we did 100 laps today, which was good as we didn’t try too many things today just got used to the track because it is a new one for me so today I was focused on learning and working on the electronics,” Quartararo said. “It has been a really good day because we made a good pace and a good lap time.

“This morning I still had a little bit of pain in my neck but everything is okay. The headache of Sunday is already gone so that’s really good. Now I am focused for tomorrow and really looking forward to riding again as it is really fun.

“We will have a few things to test tomorrow, some settings, so I am really looking forward to testing new things to see if we can improve more on today.”

Morbidelli echoed his Petronas Yamaha team-mate’s sentiments with focus remaining on the upcoming San Marino MotoGP race weekend at Misano next month.

“It was a good day, we’ve been working on the settings,” the Italian rider said. “Basically improving the settings at this track and finally we were quite fast and able to also get close to his time attack so this is a very encouraging thing.

“Tomorrow we will try to fine tune something else and improve a little bit and try to have a good pace and also chose the direction to take with the tyres, seeing which one will be the race tyres, either soft or medium.”

The Misano test concludes tomorrow.

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