Cal Crutchlow defied his ongoing arm injury to produce an encouraging display on the opening day of free practice for the San Marino Grand Prix. The LCR Honda CASTROL rider suffered complications following more surgery to his right arm at the end of last month, but still managed to prove competitive as the action got underway at Misano on Friday.

On a resurfaced but bumpy new track, the Briton impressed in the morning’s FP1 session as he finished as the leading Honda bike in eighth place. With fluid build-up on his arm making life difficult, he was unable to improve his time in the afternoon, ending 20th in FP2, but is hopeful of making further progress on Saturday.


Cal Crutchlow – 19th - (1’33.538)

“As far as riding the bike goes, I felt more positive today and I was able to do some good runs. The pace was ok, the position was not great, but we didn’t put the new tyre on in FP2 to get a good lap time, so we tried to work on the setting of the bike and the feeling of the bike, which is a bit better at this track so far. With regards to my arm, at the moment I have a lot of liquid on my arm and a lot of problems with how swollen the arm is. Maybe it’s not fully recovered, but we’re speaking a lot with the doctors and taking their advice with regard to the best thing to do throughout the weekend and we’ll make a decision tomorrow morning on whether to continue and go session by session. But overall, today was a good day to be back on the bike in Misano.”