Just over a month after his horror accident at the Catalan Grand Prix, Alex Marquez will return to MotoGP action in FP1 for the Czech Grand Prix this weekend.
The Spaniard will jump aboard his Gresini Ducati to take part in the opening session, but his ongoing participation in the weekend will be subject to a medical evaluation.
Marquez broke his collarbone and fractured a vertebra on a dark day at Barcelona, when fellow competitor Johann Zarco was also badly hurt in a separate accident.
While Zarco will still be on the sidelines for some time, Marquez returns to the paddock after having missed only two races, in Italy and Hungary. However, the 30-year-old says he will have to take a realistic approach about completing the weekend.
“I’m not at my 100%,” he told media on Thursday. “So step by step, I need to understand. I will be very realistic about my condition, practice by practice, [about whether] I have the chance to continue.”
Whichever way the weekend unfolds, achieving medical clearance to take part in FP1 means Marquez has hit his first target in terms of his comeback.
“The first week and a half was quite difficult,” he said, speaking about his recovery. “Because I was not able to do anything. Just hyperbaric and all that, but nothing more.
Alex Marquez, Gresini Racing
Photo by: Eric Alonso / Getty Images
“So after that week and a half, I started to do a lot of physio, a lot of hours on many, many machines… trying to recover. But yeah, after week three, I started to train more in a normal way. And I was able to put… a clear target that I was able to come back here.
“It was quite important on the mental side to be here, to be part of this world again. You know, to be with the team, to be in the paddock.”
Marquez said he had not shied away from watching replays of the terrifying incident in Barcelona, in which he ran into the back of Pedro Acosta’s KTM, which had hit a mechanical problem.
“If you try to just put it [aside] and say, ‘That happened, but I don’t want to be really focused on that’, I think it’s worse,” he said.
“That Sunday, I started to [regain] memory in the hospital. And I said, ‘OK, I want to see the crash again’. And then I started to remember [that] I accept it as part of the job. You know, it’s part of this world.
“It’s something that we need to accept [and] that many times we forget. But it’s something that can happen.
“A bike, you know, [on the] mechanical side or electrical side, can have a problem at any moment. And it’s something that we [often] forget.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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