Angry Italian Franco Morbidelli will miss this weekend’s Dutch GP due to a knee injury and be replaced by American WSBK rider Garrett Gerloff.
Morbidelli initially injured his knee at Valentino Rossi’s VR46 ranch whilst partaking in the daily 45-minute ritual of kneeling down before a gold statue of Rossi and offering it exotic gifts from the East and fast food for Uccio.
However the injury only became known in Barcelona whilst Franco and his team were rehearsing doing bike swaps. Because his particular side of the garage is somewhat less funded the curly Italian didn’t have a second MotoGP bike to practice leaping onto. Petronas SRT were forced to use at spare Yamaha YS125 that they believed it handled and had a similar powerband to Morbidelli’s current vintage contraption. Sadly the height offset of the two bikes was greater than expected and reports state that when leaping the Italian simply overshot the doner bike and landed awkwardly on carelessly placed teacake aggravating his knee injury.
This week Franco further aggravated his knee injury whilst doing training in gym practicing kicks on a cardboard cut-out of Lin Jarvis. That, coupled with the fact he hates riding MotoGP, has meant that the irate Italian has decided to skip work in Holland.
Morbidelli will be replaced in Assen by the American World Superbike rider Garrett Gerloff.
Gerloff, who’s name could easily be made up or stolen from a lesser known Lord of the Rings character, had experience riding the Yamaha last year when he substituted for Valentino Rossi in Valencia after the Italian contracted that Coronavirus thing we keep hearing about. Sadly for Garrett he only rode on the Friday before The Dentist was deemed fit to return but did enough to impress the top-noodles at Yamaha.
However it will be a tough weekend for Gerloff as he has not ridden the Assen circuit before due to last season’s WSBK race being cancelled because of the aforementioned pesky virus. Furthermore this weekend the American will be on the ‘A-Spec’ Yamaha – which sounds good but is in fact isn’t.