Multiple WorldSSP champion Kenan Sofuoglu (Kawasaki Puccetti Racing) has already had a troubled approach to his latest championship defence after dislocating and breaking a bone in his right thumb during a training accident a few weeks ago at his personal track in Turkey. He underwent an operation to have two pins inserted in his fractured bone at that time, to make sure he would be fit for the Phillip Island race. In a late change of plan, however, he has had to have another operation just a few days ago, in which his pins were finally removed.

“I had an operation recently on the metal pins holding my injured right thumb,” said Sofuoglu from the Phillip Island paddock. “I had hoped that we could keep the metal in there to ride the bike but the pins were hurting my skin so badly. After three weeks we decided to cut the metal, to keep them under my skin, and then we thought we could do the weekend and the race. But, just before we took the flight here to Australia, we decided to open up the skin and take out the metal. At the moment there are no more pins in there.”

Sofuoglu now faces a personal race before the opening weekend to be ready to compete and that means hopefully taking to the track on the first day of the official Dorna tests on Monday 20th.

He needs to make final checks on his physical condition before taking to the track be his is determined to ride at PI if he possibly can. “When we took the metalwork out the muscles in my thumb had no power. The power is coming back but not enough yet. The bone is OK but the problem was that my thumb was dislocated in the crash. There will be some support around my thumb to help the situation. I will test, to try and get some feeling, but the plan is to do the race. First thing tomorrow morning we will take an X-ray to see if the thumb is in the correct position or not. If it is in the correct position then probably Dorna will allow me to start.  We will only know this tomorrow morning.”