until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
There have been many stupid injuries in MotoGP. From severed tendons while cutting a block of parmesan cheese to slipping on a wet cobblestone in cycling cleats or simply tripping and falling over in the paddock, riders have gone into race weekends carrying injuries for all sorts of silly seasons in recent seasons.
Yet out of all of those injuries and more (and yes, you might have picked up that all three examples are the luckless Cal Crutchlow!), nothing even comes close to the stupidity exhibited by Alex Rins at the Catalan Grand Prix, when the Suzuki rider rode straight into the back of a parked van while cycling the circuit.
Distracted by sending a “very important” text message when he should have been watching where he was going, he was able to ride the entire start-finish straight without noticing the rather large white van that was stationary in his path, on what is one of the widest circuits in the calendar.
In many ways, though, he’s not just lucky to have escaped with only a broken wrist that ruled him out for just a single race. He’s perhaps even luckier that not only does he still have a job but that he hasn’t even faced a public rebuke from his team.
It’s not a huge surprise that Suzuki, with its reputation as a family-feeling factory team, hasn’t hit out at its rider publicly let alone questioned his continuing position with the team.
Hopefully, there have been some strong words in private, though, because Rins needs to hear them. He’s a professional athlete and a role model, and he did something very stupid.
However, there’s a small chance that the injury, the embarrassment and the experience of watching the last race from his garage might be exactly what the 25-year-old Spaniard needed to reset his head after a difficult start to the 2021 season for him.
Prior to sitting out the race in Barcelona, he’d crashed out of the previous four events, every time making a basic error while in a strong position but under pressure from a rival. It’s a trend from his whole career, but it’s become particularly noticeable this year – and unless he addresses it then it’s going to ruin any chances he has of ever being considered a title contender.
That’s why what happened on his ill-fated bicycle ride might be a blessing in disguise. It forced a reset, and it forced the Spaniard to take a step back from the pressures of the series, and will probably mean that he’s not at 100% in this weekend’s German Grand Prix – and therefore hopefully more likely to not find himself in the sort of situation that will cause a crash.
There’s history there from 2020, too, after the shoulder injury that saw him miss the first race of the year in Jerez. A sedate start gave Rins time to build up to race-winning form as his body recovered (despite a few hiccups along the way), and team management might be hoping for a repeat effect in 2021.
Of course, there is another question that needs addressing too, though: why exactly is he crashing so much?
Well, it seems that Suzuki hasn’t made the same step forward as many of its rivals during the winter break, and the current GSX-RR doesn’t have the advantage over the rest of the field that it had in 2020.
That, in turn, means that the riders are having to push harder than they were last year – something evident not only in Rins’ crash record but in the positions of his team-mate and reigning world champion Joan Mir, too.
Fifth in the championship but only twice a podium finisher so far this year, Mir hasn’t got either the consistency or the speed of last year either – and hopes of a late surge to retain his title might be wishful thinking…
