Before this weekend’s MotoGP race at Phillip Island, homeboy Casey Stoner revealed that his mysterious illness that made him take a 3 race break from the 2009 championship may have been putting him danger on the race track.
“It was something I never wanted to do, I never wanted to take the break but it was just becoming ridiculous.
I was maybe becoming dangerous on the bike, I was so exhausted and it’s just not the best way to be out there racing.
“When you’re not there and you know you’re competitive enough to be at the front but just can’t stay there, race after race it was just becoming too hard.
Mentally that did destroy me a little bit, the fact that we knew we had a good bike to win races.
I knew I was fast enough to win races and we just couldn’t finish the job.
We also weren’t giving the right information to Ducati for the next year as well when we’re trying to develop this bike, but because the championship was already slipping away from us as well, there was no point in carrying on.
We had no fight left in us.
” A much more happy and confident Stoner after his second place at the Estoril GP also revealed that he has restarted some light training in these last two weeks and that his doctors are still working on finding out what caused his initial health problems and expects to return to be fully fit for next season.
“The positive we found this year is hopefully we’re not going to have this problem again.
We’re going to be able to go into next year’s championship knowing that we’re at full health.
I’m on a sodium diet.
I went off lactose and (did) a few different things all at once but we’re still not sure which one out of them worked – or if maybe it was a group effort of the separate things we’re trying maybe all working together.
So at the end of this season we’re going to go off them all again and then go back on them one by one and try and find out which one was the fix.
If it’s a simple thing, just like sodium, then we’re really happy.
If it’s lactose then it’s something your body grows into and slowly develops a bit of an allergic reaction to it and that can be causing the problems that I have.
No one really understood quite how serious it was and it was getting to the point where we had a crash at Donington Park (in England) and I had no idea why.
It was just from weakness, fatigue and we couldn’t keep going the way we were.
It was better to go away and come back a lot fitter and stronger.
”Not one to pussy foot around and knowing it’s easy to ask questions with hindsight, but isn’t puking twice in your helmet at +300 km/h and having the dry heaves just as dangerous as being weak? We’d also like to know about the arm pump and the unhealed scaphoid problems that were revealed after the Laguna Seca GP.