- Raul Fernandez broke two fingers in a first lap collision with his own Aprilia teammate, Marco Bezzecchi, in Saturday’s sprint in Indonesia.
- He hid the full extent of the injury, relearned how to brake with an altered lever setup overnight, and still finished second in Sunday’s Grand Prix, leading 18 of 27 laps.
- The crash and its fallout exposed real strain inside Aprilia, with Jorge Martin shoving a team manager after losing the race lead and later apologizing.
He Found Out His Second Finger Was Broken the Next Morning and Told Nobody
Raul Fernandez looked down at his right hand after the first lap of Saturday’s sprint in Mandalika and knew immediately that something was wrong. His Aprilia teammate, Marco Bezzecchi, had collided with him at the first corner, and the impact had broken the index finger Fernandez uses to work the front brake. That alone would have ended most riders’ weekends. Fernandez had just qualified on pole for the first time in his career, and his participation in Sunday’s Grand Prix was suddenly in real doubt. Then, the next morning, he discovered the damage was worse than he thought. A second finger was broken too, one nobody, not his team, not the medical staff, had caught the day before. “Nobody knew,” he said. He had kept the pain to himself so he could stay focused on the one race that mattered.
What happened next is the kind of detail that gets lost in a championship table that only records finishing positions. Trackhouse’s mechanics reworked his handlebar overnight, shifting the position of the brake lever so Fernandez could still ride without using his usual index finger. The fix left him, in his own words, with “completely zero” feel for braking or cornering. He had to relearn how to ride his own motorcycle in the hours before a Grand Prix. He did it, started from pole, and finished second, leading 18 of the race’s 27 laps on a hand he described as being in severe pain by lap 13 or 14. “It was really difficult,” he said of the moment he first looked down and saw his hand after the crash. He admitted he was afraid he might not even be able to start. When he reached the podium anyway, he called it simply “amazing,” the kind of understated word a rider reaches for when the alternative is explaining just how close the whole thing came to not happening at all.
A Collision Between Teammates That Nobody at Aprilia Wanted to Talk About
The identity of the rider who broke Fernandez’s fingers counts for as much as the injury itself. Bezzecchi is his teammate, not a rival from a different manufacturer, and the two of them are supposed to be working together to deliver Aprilia a championship it has waited its whole modern history to win. Instead, the opening lap of the sprint produced a crash between the team’s own riders, one that left Fernandez racing through pain for the rest of the weekend while Bezzecchi went on to win Sunday’s Grand Prix outright, his first victory in five months, dating back to Mugello, and the 300th Grand Prix win by an Italian rider.
The tension did not stay contained to that one incident. Jorge Martin, Aprilia’s championship contender and the man who entered the weekend leading the standings, had avoided two separate red flag incidents and looked capable of taking the race lead from Bezzecchi when Fernandez, his own stablemate, lunged at him at Turn 4 on the final restart and took him out of contention entirely. Stewards handed out no penalty, reasoning that Fernandez’s move had initially been a legitimate overtake and that Martin had not left him enough room. Martin did not take it well. Television cameras caught him storming back through the pit box after the race and shoving Aprilia team manager Paolo Bonora. He apologized the next day. “This is something I want to apologise for, the first thing, to the team and to Bonora,” he said, adding that he had been “really hot” in the moment and was “disappointed” in how he reacted. It is not every weekend that a title contender has to publicly apologize to his own team for losing his temper with a staff member, and it says plenty about how badly Indonesia went for the side of the garage that was supposed to be celebrating.
Three Riders, Two Points, and a Title Fight That Just Got Personal
Underneath all of it sits a championship battle that has rarely been tighter. Martin leads with 355 points. Marc Marquez sits second on 353, just two points back. Bezzecchi, after his Indonesia win, has closed to within 46 points of the lead and is now firmly part of the conversation rather than a distant third. Everyone below that trio, Francesco Bagnaia included, is mathematically out of the running with 185 points still on the table and too large a gap to close. That leaves three men fighting for one title over the final rounds of the season, and two of them, Martin and Bezzecchi, ride for the same manufacturer and sit in garages separated by a thin wall.
Fernandez’s role complicates that fight further than a simple teammate crash would suggest. He is not a title contender himself, sitting well back in the standings, but his results directly shape who wins and loses between Martin and Bezzecchi, and Indonesia proved he can swing a race either way depending on how a single corner unfolds. Reports around the paddock say Aprilia is debating team orders for the final rounds to manage exactly this kind of collision between its own riders, a step that would only add more pressure to a group of teammates who are, at least for now, also each other’s biggest obstacle. Martin is already set to leave Aprilia for Yamaha in 2027, a departure that makes the current tension even harder to smooth over given there is no long term relationship left to protect.
What a Broken Hand Says About What These Riders Are Actually Racing For
Fernandez has built his career on exactly this kind of toughness. He spent his first two MotoGP seasons with the satellite RNF squad before Trackhouse took over the Aprilia customer slot, and he has steadily turned himself from a promising but inconsistent rider into one of the grid’s most reliable podium threats this year. A pole position, his first in the premier class, was supposed to be the headline from Indonesia. Instead the lasting image from Mandalika will be the one of a rider who said nothing about a second broken bone, knowing a championship fight he is not even part of still needed him to show up and race.
None of the politics inside Aprilia’s garage changes what Fernandez did on track. He qualified on pole with a hand he did not yet know was fully broken, raced a sprint most riders would have sat out, had his equipment physically altered overnight by mechanics working against the clock, and then spent 27 laps of a Grand Prix relearning basic inputs while leading two thirds of the race. He finished second. In a sport built on split second braking and corner entry precision, riding with “completely zero” references is not a minor handicap. It is close to riding blind.
Fernandez will take painkillers and scans into the final rounds of a season that now has real stakes attached to every one of his results, whether he intends it or not. His own championship hopes are a formality at this point, but his bike is now a variable in a three way fight for the title that neither Martin nor Bezzecchi can fully control. The next time these three riders share the same piece of track, the memory of Mandalika, the shove in the pit box, the apology, and the quiet image of a rider hiding a second broken finger so he would not be pulled from his home race, will be sitting in the back of everyone’s mind.
Sources:
- Crash.net – Raul Fernandez Makes Shocking MotoGP Injury Revelation After Indonesia Podium
- The Race – Martin Apologises For Shoving Aprilia MotoGP Team Manager
- Crash.net – Aprilia: Jorge Martin “Owed an Apology” in “High Drama” Indonesian GP
- Crash.net – Mandalika: New 2026 MotoGP World Championship Standings
