Pedrosa wants to get on RC212V and off painkillers for Assen race

Dani Pedrosa had little time to recover from a hip injury ahead of his home round in Barcelona last time out, and suffered discomfort throughout the race weekend which he had felt obliged to attend in order to keep up with the MotoGP series leaders. The Spaniard has had more time to recover for the Alice TT Assen, with the idea being to ride in the Netherlands without the aid of painkillers.

“Since the race in Barcelona I’ve basically been resting, trying to give my hip as much chance to improve as possible. Obviously there hasn’t been a lot of time - just over one week - but I certainly feel a lot better now than immediately after the last race when I was totally exhausted,” says the Repsol Honda rider, who struggled to sixth at the last race.

“I’m feeling positive about the weekend and we’ll just have to see how it goes when riding starts on Thursday. My intention would be to ride without receiving any pain-killing injections because gradually they lose their effectiveness and they are not something I want to rely on - we’ll see how the feeling is when I start to ride.”

Pedrosa has been taking the medication since a ‘tankslapper’ moment at the Italian round of the World Championship at Mugello, although the required sensitivity, grip and movement onboard a MotoGP machine has been lacking due to the nature of the injections.

Assen has traditionally been a fruitful track for the former World Championship runner-up, who finished second in the 2008 edition of the Saturday race.