MILLER ATTACKS!
• Aussie ace silences critics • What went wrong for Fabio?
As soon as I saw Quartararo start dropping I suspected it was arm pump. It’s such a shame for him, but we’re seeing in MotoGP it’s become something they really have to think about. A lot of the big hitters over the years have suffered with it although I don’t think Rossi has ever had a problem with it. I’ve had it a couple of times on short circuits and also on the first night of practice at the TT because you’re holding on so tight. You go to bed that night thinking how the hell am I going to do two weeks of this, but day by day it gets easier as you relax and stop gripping so tight. I used to take an aspirin to thin my blood which was an old school way of trying to deal with it.
But arm pump is horrendous to the point where it’s dangerous. Even if you had a gun to your head there is nothing you can do about it. You can sustain high heart rate and fight through fatigue, but you can’t push through arm pump. It’s a strange thing too, speaking about my own personal experience – the more I thought about arm pump – the more it came and the worse it was.
I can’t even begin to appreciate what riding a current MotoGP is like. 300bhp and smashing the carbon brakes at 200mph – it’s in another stratosphere compared to what I’m used to.
And for Quartararo the penalty doesn’t fit the crime. All the training a rider like him does, the shrinks he’s seen. All his planets align and now this. He needs to get the problem fixed pronto, because it’s the type of thing that could also affect him in his head. No amount of massaging is going to sort that, it’s a fundamental issue that he needs sorting. What the weekend showed was that everyone thought that Yamaha were going to blitz the Jerez race and it ended up as a Ducati 1-2.
It just shows that – just like last year – you simply can’t call the results in advance. And one other thing, I reckon that has to be the first race since 1996 where we never saw Valentino Rossi on the TV! It’s very rare that you don’t see at least a few shots of Vale! The times are changing…
‘No amount of massaging can fix arm pump’