VOL. 55 ISSUE 50 DECEMBER 18, 2018 P75
fect bike" on more than
one occasion.
Did Herlings push the
limit to excel so strongly? The col-
lision with Cairoli for round nine of
20 in Great Britain that left the latter
on the floor in the battle for the lead
(with a tweaked knee) and saw him
soundly beaten in the second moto
was a flashpoint that KTM man-
aged to contain. Cairoli was ag-
grieved, and the metaphysical wall
in the team solidified a little further.
Herlings brushed it off as a racing
incident rather than a take-out.
Two rounds later and Herlings
was gone. His feverish intensity
finally bit back and a broken col-
larbone in a crash while training
caused him to miss the GP of
Lombardia. Cairoli seized the
initiative to go 1-1 again and cut
a slowly extending deficit to a
despondent Herlings down to 10
points. The championship leader
would later call it "devastating"
to sit at home recuperating from
surgery and watch his advantage
in the series rapidly erode.
There was urgency to return,
and that void of panic and uncer-
tainty brought back painful memo-
ries of 2014 and 2015. Herlings
was back in the saddle a little over
two weeks after an operation to re-
insert a plate into his upper torso.
He diced with Cairoli (who picked
up his first hand injury in what was
one of the key moments of 2018
as the pendulum swung back in
Herlings' favor) in Indonesia and
prevailed. From that moment on,
he would remain unbeaten.
"For the first event back after
injury, I thought he took a little too
much risk," Gruebel said in an
article on KTM's Blog page www.
blog.ktm.com. "Okay, he saw the
win, but he could have paid a high
price for it. He took a risk, but so
did Tony, and he got the short
end of the stick when he hurt his
thumb and, in the end, it worked
out for Jeffrey. In my opinion it was
not necessary to put that pressure
on himself to again be winning so
soon after the surgery."
Herlings triumphed in the
second Indonesian fixture the
following week then the Czech
Republic, Belgium, Switzerland,
Bulgaria, Turkey, Holland and
gives up. He puts so much
hours during the week."
Manager Dirk Gruebel
