World MXGP champion Jeffrey Herlings seems sure to race in Russia this weekend, as our good friend Tim Gerth found out last week from the MXGP World champion.
“I still have some problems”, Herlings said. “I can’t call it pain, but it is progressing daily. Maybe it would have been better in terms of results, but then you are fooling your body.”
“Normally Russia is not a question mark. Let’s keep it at 95%. Otherwise, I would train anyway, so let’s see it as training. If I bring a result, it is better than a double zero score. This has just been a good training day. Better than if we were going to train somewhere else, so I’m going home with a good feeling.”
If you like to read the full story (in Dutch), you can check out nl.motorsport.com and thanks again Tim for sending the comments over to us. Always appreciated.
Herlings also talked about this first race back in eight months and the difficulties he is having at the moment.
“Everyone expects you to win immediately when you return, but that is not realistic. That is nice to see. Of course, they haven’t seen me drive for a long time. I think it’s a shame I haven’t been able to show. I’m just not in my old way yet.”
“In the second moto, I physically collapsed completely. That is something we still have to work on and that will be fine, but it will take a while. I just did not hold the engine properly anymore and this is not the time to take risks. Whether I could have kept them? Of course, I could have done that, but it was better to take it easy. After three or four rounds, the light was almost out. I really had to do my best not to bump my foot again. This is a job that I have to do my best. This was indeed not the best job, but when should I have returned? I can’t keep postponing, although I actually jumped on the bike as quickly as possible. I couldn’t really train properly.”
“We have ridden seven times now. It is also only the second time that I have been riding 35 minutes twice in a day. The rest of the boys are in the middle of the season and this is my first competition in nine months. I think that I can keep up with them is something we cannot be dissatisfied with.”
