VOL. 52 ISSUE 28 JULY 18, 2015 P77
adrift at the end. Then came the
Suzukis, five seconds ahead
of 12-placed Hernandez at the
finish.
Aprilia's Alvaro Bautista and
Crutchlow's teammate on the
Open class Honda, Jack Miller,
were locked in combat, but were
caught and eventually passed
by Hector Barbera on the Avintia
Ducati, who was top Open bike
in 13th at the end, and Miller
15th, taking the last point.
Aspar Honda's Nicky Hayden
was a lone 16th. "We expected
better," he said. "I got a good
Briefly...
fan Bradl—was obliged to play the
rueful wallflower at the German GP,
after breaking his scaphoid in a
race crash at Assen. It was promptly
surgically repaired, but medical ad-
vice was strongly against riding two
weeks later. "It didn't make sense to
try," he said, on hand to fulfill spon-
sorship duties. "I can't even ride a
pedal bike or a scooter, so even if I
used painkillers it would be risky, and
below my potential. Now I can see
the guys riding from the outside…
and maybe I can learn something."
Stefan Bradl's place on the Open
Athina Yamaha was taken by ex-
grand prix racer Claudio Corti, who
clearly found the bike a bit of a hand-
ful. There were two other substi-
tutes for the race: Michael Laverty
on the Aprilia, and former 250 cham-
pion Hiro Aoyama on the still-injured
Karel Abraham's Open Honda.
Aoyama, official HRC test rider, is
becoming a regular, subbing also for
Pedrosa for three races at the start
of the season.
Race Direction put on its jackboots
in Germany, putting into action all the
threats of harsh discipline issued two
weekends ago at Assen to punish
many of the Moto3 riders deemed to
have been loitering on the racing line
in qualifying, constituting not only an
obstacle, but also danger to other
riders. Seventeen penalties for the
offence were issued, eleven of them
in the smallest class, where instead
of penalty points riders are put back
three places on the grid, and further-
more miss the first 10 minutes of the
20-minute race-day warm-up session.
The guilty parties were Anna Carrasco,
Jorge Navarro, Andrea Migno, John
McPhee, Maria Herrera, Niklas Ajo,
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