Acosta out of Australian MotoGP with shoulder injury

Pedro Acosta will miss Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix thanks to left shoulder trauma resulting from his crash in Saturday’s MotoGP sprint race.

The Tech3 KTM rookie dislocated his shoulder when he fell on lap 11 of 13 at Phillip Island. Although nothing was broken, the 20-year-old was declared unfit following further medical checks on Sunday morning.

Despite some flashes of pace for the rider who took pole position last time out in Japan, a poorly-timed qualifying run meant he only qualified 15th, his worst starting position of the year.

The Spaniard had only progressed as high as 11th place when his bike spat him into the air. In the violent impact with the ground, his shoulder popped out of place, although it was later repositioned.

After an initial medical examination he was released from the medical centre, with the plan to check how he spent the night and re-evaluate his condition before Sunday’s warm up.

Despite getting up with the intention of trying to participate in the warm up before the main race, the pain was intense and led the doctors to declare him unfit.

This will be the first time Acosta has missed a race in the top category. However, it does not seem that the injury will prevent him from competing in the next two rounds of the calendar, next week in Thailand and a week later in Malaysia.

Until then, the Spaniard will receive conservative, minimally invasive treatment, based on giving the joint time to heal so that he can get on the bike next Friday at Buriram.

“I’ve crashed many times in my career, but this is the first time in my life that the bike spat me into the air when entering the corner,” said Acosta, who has accumulated 24 crashes this season.

He leads that particular metric ahead of even Marc Marquez, who has 22 accidents, but none so far this weekend.

Acosta was unable to finish either the short or the long race in Japan two weeks ago. On Saturday he crashed from the lead of sprint when he seemed on the verge of his breakthrough win.

He then fell in the Japanese Grand Prix on the following day, while disputing the lead with Francesco Bagnaia.