OGURA OUT OF ARAGON AFTER THUMB SURGERY, SAVADORI STANDS IN
Ai Ogura will miss the Aragon Grand Prix after breaking his left thumb in a training crash in Japan. Aprilia test rider Lorenzo Savadori replaces him at Trackhouse for the weekend.
The team said Ogura hurt his left hand while training at home during the second short summer break. The fracture, close to the thumb, was only identified as needing surgery once he arrived back in Europe.
Ogura sits third in the world championship on 203 points, behind Aprilia’s factory pair of Jorge Martin on 240 and Marco Bezzecchi on 209. He is 37 points off the lead with ten rounds still to run, so this is a live title campaign rather than a good season.
Marc Marquez, Fabio Di Giannantonio and Raul Fernandez are all within 19 points of him, which means he could leave Aragon having dropped as far as sixth without turning a wheel. He also arrives at this in poor form through no real fault of his own, having finished on the podium in the Silverstone sprint before crashing out of the Grand Prix on the sixth lap.
This is only Ogura’s second year in the premier class, after arriving as the reigning Moto2 champion. In June he won the Dutch TT at Assen, becoming the first Japanese rider to win a premier-class Grand Prix in 22 years, since Makoto Tamada won at Motegi. He has been a regular in the top five all year.
Aragon has also become an unlucky circuit for him specifically. He missed the same race last season through a leg injury, so this is two years in a row that he has been sidelined for this round.
His replacement is a familiar face inside Aprilia. Savadori is the manufacturer’s test rider and has already raced this season, standing in for Bezzecchi at Jerez earlier in the year. He knows the RS-GP as well as anyone outside the full-time riders, though a test rider dropped into a race weekend at short notice is realistically fighting for points at best rather than replacing what Ogura would have scored.
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