Honda has been at Sepang this week with Aleix Espargaro and Takaaki Nakagami for testing<\/a>, with the pair seemingly putting the brand\u2019s 2027 850cc bike through its paces again.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
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However, Espargaro has revealed he was hospitalised after a heavy crash on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
He took to his social media channels to state that he suffered four broken vertebrae but has been cleared to fly home, where he will be evaluated for surgery in Barcelona.<\/p>\n
His post on Instagram read: \u201cOn Tuesday, during the test here in Sepang, I suffered a very heavy crash.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result, I sustained several contusions and four broken vertebrae, although by a very small margin, and thankfully, they did not affect the spinal cord.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter a few days at CU Aurelius Hospital, where I\u2019ve been treated incredibly well, I\u2019m now able to fly home with [my wife] Laura, who came to the rescue from the other side of the world (once again, and I\u2019ve lost count\u2026) and there we will evaluate whether surgery is needed at Quiron Dexeus.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThanks to my entire Honda team for taking care of me these past few days. Sorry for the scare, I\u2019ll be back!\u201d<\/p>\n
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Espargaro\u2019s injuries will come as a blow to Honda\u2019s intensive development programme, after revealing earlier this year that it had first put its 850cc prototype on track in December.<\/p>\n
While no wildcard plans had been announced, the upcoming Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez presented an opportunity for Espargaro to race for the first time this season ahead of the first in-season test of 2026 on the Monday afterwards.<\/p>\n
There will be four in-season tests this year, following the Spanish Grand Prix, Catalan Grand Prix, Czech Grand Prix and Austrian Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
The latter pair of tests will mark the first Pirelli running for the current grid, which has so far been done in private by test riders.<\/p>\n
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MotoGP was due to be in race action this weekend in Qatar, but war in the Middle East forced the event to be postponed until later in the year.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Honda MotoGP test rider Aleix Espargaro has revealed he suffered four broken vertebrae in a \u201cvery heavy crash\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[163184,64,63,245659,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-596498","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-aleix-espargaro","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-honda-hrc-motogp","12":"tag-motor","13":"tag-motor-sports","14":"tag-motosport","15":"tag-motosports","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}