- Fermin Aldeguer will miss the Malaysian Grand Prix after breaking his thumb at Mandalika, the same track where he won his first premier-class race in 2025.
- It is the sixth MotoGP round he has missed this season, after a broken femur in January and a fractured vertebra at Assen in June.
- Superbike rider Iker Lecuona, who has already filled in for Gresini twice this year, will ride Aldeguer’s Desmosedici at Sepang.
The Track That Made Him, the Track That Broke Him Again
Fermin Aldeguer won his first MotoGP race at Mandalika in 2025, a result that announced him as one of the series’ most promising young talents on a circuit most fans barely knew existed before that weekend. A year later, the same stretch of Indonesian tarmac ended his season. Running fourth on the second lap of the Indonesian Grand Prix, well inside the points and looking every bit the rider who had conquered that exact corner combination twelve months earlier, he slid off at Turn 16 and broke the base of his right first metacarpal, the bone at the root of his thumb. Gresini Racing confirmed on Sunday at Phillip Island that he will also sit out the Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang, his sixth missed round of 2026.
The cruelty of the location is hard to overstate. Mandalika gave Aldeguer his signature victory and, a year later, took his season away in the same breath. It was also his third crash of that single race weekend, a detail that says plenty about how physically unforgiving the Indonesian circuit had become for him specifically, even as other riders moved through the same sessions without incident.
A Broken Femur Before the Season Even Started
Aldeguer’s 2026 campaign was in trouble before a single championship point had been handed out. A serious practice crash near Valencia in early January broke his left femur, an injury severe enough to rule him out of the Sepang and Buriram preseason tests and the Thailand season opener. Michele Pirro deputized in his place while Aldeguer worked through a recovery that pushed his actual start to the year back by weeks. For a rider who had just come off a breakout win the previous season, opening 2026 on the sidelines rather than building on that result cost him momentum he never fully got back.
He eventually returned, but the season refused to give him a clean run. In late June, he fractured a vertebra in a crash at Assen, an injury serious enough to keep him out of both the Sachsenring and Silverstone rounds that followed. Iker Lecuona, a Superbike rider with previous experience standing in at Gresini, took the Silverstone ride in his absence. It was the second time in a single season that Aldeguer’s own team had to reach outside its regular roster just to field a competitive bike in his place.
Surgery, Screws, and a Brief Message to Fans
The thumb fracture from Mandalika required surgery in Barcelona, where doctors repaired the break with screws. MotoGP’s own medical director, Angel Charte, confirmed the diagnosis at the circuit, lending an official stamp to what had already looked like a serious injury in the replays. Aldeguer updated his own fans afterward on social media, keeping the message short and measured. He said the operation had gone well and that he was okay, a brief note that matched the tone he has kept through a season defined far more by medical updates than race results.
There is something telling in how little Aldeguer has said publicly about the toll of this year. Riders who go through one serious crash often talk at length about recovery, motivation, and the mental side of coming back. Aldeguer has instead let the string of injuries speak for itself: a femur in January, a vertebra in June, a thumb in October. Three different bones, three different circuits, one season.
Lecuona Steps In Again
Iker Lecuona will take the Desmosedici at Sepang, his second stand-in appearance of the year after covering for Aldeguer at Silverstone. He has also deputized for Alex Marquez at Gresini in the past, making him the team’s trusted emergency option whenever one of its contracted riders cannot race. At Phillip Island, filling in on a satellite entry, Lecuona scored a championship point in the sprint race, a result that gives Gresini real confidence heading into Sepang rather than simply hoping to survive another weekend down a rider.
For Lecuona, a Superbike rider by trade, each of these call-ups functions as an audition in front of the entire MotoGP paddock. Every clean lap on a factory-adjacent Ducati adds to a resume that could eventually tempt a team to offer him a full-time seat of his own, even as the circumstances that create these opportunities, another rider’s injury, are never ones he would wish for.
What the Standings Say and What They Do Not
Aldeguer sits tenth in the championship, a position that undersells how good his bike actually looked whenever his body allowed him to race it. He is likely to be passed soon by Enea Bastianini, who has stayed healthy and kept accumulating points while Aldeguer cycled through casts, screws, and recovery timelines. On pure results, 2026 will read as a step backward from the rider who won at Mandalika the year before. On pure speed, the races he actually finished suggest otherwise, including a sixth-place qualifying effort and a fourth-place running position at the very event that ended his season.
Aldeguer is already set to join VR46 for a future season, a move that gives this injury-ravaged year an added layer of stakes. A rider heading toward a new team wants to arrive with momentum, not a medical file. Instead, he will spend the close of 2026 rehabbing a thumb rather than building the kind of late-season form that typically carries a rider’s confidence into a new garage. The win at Mandalika proved what he can do on a motorcycle when healthy. The rest of this season proved how much simply staying healthy can decide a career, no matter how much raw speed a rider carries into a race weekend.
Gresini Racing has built its own recent history on exactly this kind of resilience. The team won a MotoGP title with Jorge Martin in 2024 after Martin himself survived a string of crashes earlier in his career, and it has leaned on reserve riders more than once when its contracted stars went down. Keeping Lecuona on retainer, even informally, has turned out to be one of the smartest moves the team made this year, and without him, Gresini would have been forced to field an inexperienced wildcard or leave a bike parked entirely for three separate rounds.
Aldeguer’s own patience through all of this stands out against a sport that often rewards loud frustration over quiet recovery. He has not criticized the Mandalika layout, the bike, or his own riding in public. He has not used any of the three injuries as a platform to question his team’s setup choices or his own preparation. Instead, he has posted brief updates, gone through surgery three times in a single calendar year, and let his results, when healthy, make the case that the talent which won him a race at Mandalika in 2025 never actually left.
What comes next counts for more than what already happened. A rider who can qualify sixth and run fourth on a bike he has barely had time to develop across a full season still has a case to make to VR46 before he even arrives. The question hanging over the next few months is not whether Aldeguer has the speed. Mandalika already answered that twice, once with a trophy and once with a broken thumb. The question is whether his body will let him prove it again before the clock runs out on 2026.
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