In a dramatic end to Kev Coghlan's entry in the Schleiz round of the IDM Superbike championship. the Scottish rider had a serious accident resulting in severe back injuries.  The upshot was trackside treatment to stabilise his injuries followed by evacuation by helicopter to the regional hospital some 50 miles away, where specialists assessed the main injuries to be damage to 6 vertebrae.  

After a worrying 24 hours when a news blackout was maintained until more was known, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief with the news the spinal injuries were operable, and Kev successfully underwent an operation to stabilise his injuries earlier today. Early indications are that Kev will be hospitalised  for 7 to10 days, and will then have a period of recuperation.  

The Scot was even able to send out a tweet to fans from his hospital bed. In typical understatement he said:

"Hi everyone, sorry for the lack of news! So I had a bit of a biggie yesterday in the second IDM SuperBike race.  I've fractured 6 vertebrae, they have operated to fix one of them in place as it was quite unstable but everything looks ok now. Waitin checks."

Details of the cause of the crash are unclear at present, which happened going into a fast corner in the first sector of lap 2.  The outcome was an extremely high speed crash of the worst sort.

The unfortunate outcome came after the Scot had finishing 4th in Race 1 of the Superbike class, just missing out on a podium.  He had been confident of repeating or improving on this in Race 2 but it was not to be.

Updates on Kev's recuperation will be posted as and when we have them, in the meantime we wish Kev a speedy recovery.