Hiro to Zero

Sorry about the bad pun, but it’s pretty bad news for reigning 250cc World Champion, Hiroshi Aoyama. His accident in the Warm-up for the British Grand Prix on Sunday looks like having some serious ramifications. Hiro has damaged the T12 vertebrae in his back and has been ruled out of the next 2 meetings on doctor’s advice. However, the team believes that his absence could be longer (so do I, spinal injuries are grave things) and so are looking for a longer term solution to the problem.

They have hired in rider-for-hire Kousuke Akiyoshi to replace Hiro for the next two rounds and are looking at perhaps another rider if Hiro’s absence stretches. Akiyoshi does have MotoGp experience, having subbed at the Suzuki team 4 times from 2006 to 2008. He is also a former winner of the Suzuka 8 Hour race so he’s no mug. He’s obviously ridden for Honda at some stage, too, if this picture is any indication (though it maye have been taken during testing). So at least there will be 16 bikes on the grid at Assen this weekend.

This weekend will also se the WSBK back on deck at Misano and I’ll publish a more complete preview of that in the next couple of days.

My post about the TT certainly stirred up some controversy, but the one area of agreement was the Island’s lack of safety. This was dramatically illustrated in the potentially fatal crash involving Guy Martin. Incredibly, the owner of the team has come out in public and criticised Martin for his “lack of commitment” in the races at the TT. This while Martin is still in hospital recuperating. Weird.

I don’t need to tell you how lucky Martin has been to survive this.

And, on the subject of Jeremy Burgess, apparently he also said this on the telecast the other night.

““We’ve been at 990s, now we’re going to 1000s, and why are we doing it? To reduce costs to try and increase more teams to come onto the grid and participate – we don’t know if it will be successful,” said Burgess.

“If I had a blank sheet of paper, I’d make MotoGP 600cc. The world base for racing from what I see is 600s. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Italy, Australia, United States or Germany – throughout the world the entry level for road racing seems to be 600s.

“I think we could probably develop all the way through with different levels of machine and technology to [make MotoGP] a prototype class at 600cc. Bring MotoGP to 600s, make some adjustments perhaps in the Moto2, and work with those two categories.”