It is not easy for the Dutch drivers at the TT. Zonta van den Goorbergh slid down at high speed and is therefore in pain, Collin Veijer drove an eighteenth time in training and Bo Bendsneyder does not even enter the track at all. For the time being, the TT is anything but an orange party.
About nine minutes into the second free practice of Moto2, Zonta van den Goorbergh fell off his bike hard. The 17-year-old driver was flipped off the machine in the Geert Timmer corner, the site of the fast steering to the right and left towards the final straight of the TT Circuit. Van den Goorbergh then slid for tens of meters, while his motorcycle came bouncing after him and was thus destroyed.
With the necessary misery, the racing talent then walked out of the gravel trap. ,,My legs are still shaking a bit”, Van den Goorbergh said shortly after the crash in front of the Ziggo Sport cameras. When analyzing a few images, it was not yet possible to put the finger on the sore spot. Van den Goorbergh drove normally, he said. “I didn’t do anything crazy.”
A little later, when the first emotions had subsided and father and former driver Jurgen van den Goorbergh also gave his son an encouraging tap on the behind, the cause still turned out to be a big question mark. Yes, he braked a little later, but that is not the problem according to the driver. “Eight times out of ten nothing happens.”
At first, the teen seemed to get off unscathed. When the adrenaline had already dropped slightly, he felt pain coming on, especially on his right wrist. Muscles in the back, buttock and left leg are also stiff. “I think I will wake up tomorrow (Saturday, ed.) as an 80-year-old man,” he said with a smile. ,,But I also realize that I was lucky, because I could have been lying on a hospital bed now. Or see how it ended with Bo (Bendsneyder, ed.).”
Bendsneyder did not pass the medical examination on Thursday due to a broken collarbone, suffered from a fall in Germany on Sunday, and is therefore forced to watch. Given the speed with which Van den Goorbergh crashed to the ground – he himself spoke of the biggest crash in his career – it was feared for a second Dutch dropout in the TT, but Van den Goorbergh will just step on his Kalex for qualifying on Saturday .
The Bredanaar has the disadvantage compared to the competition that he has hardly been able to make training hours. Due to technical difficulties, his laps in the first practice session in the morning were already limited, in the afternoon practice he lost half an hour of valuable preparation time. Moto2 drivers have already grumbled about the limited number of minutes they are allowed on the track this season. They had to hand in because space has to be made for the new sprint race in MotoGP this season.
The only Dutchman who currently looks forward to Sunday’s race without a setback is Collin Veijer in Moto3. The 18-year-old driver from Staphorst impressed two weeks ago with a sixth place in Italy. An occasional success? It didn’t look like that in Germany last week, when he was allowed to start from the second row and even briefly raced over the Sachsenring during the race. Unfortunately for the youngster from Staphorst, he then crashed.
With these achievements in mind, Veijer’s eighteenth training time on Friday may even be disappointing. But the driver from Overijssel said he was happy with the speed he achieved on the TT Circuit. ,,I drove the entire training on my own”, he said. The loneliness on the track is also a conscious choice of his team in order to teach him as much as possible.
During qualifying he will visit his colleagues more in order to win starting places. “For a good lap time I would have to drive in someone else’s slipstream. Then it is possible to get into the top fourteen”, says Veijer.