Honda Racing’s Alvaro Bautista will assess his race fitness on Friday at the Magny-Cours WorldSBK round after fracturing bones in his foot in a whopping highside at Catalunya.

Bautista went old-school two-stroke with the crash was was lucky to escape further injury when his Fireblade spat him off as he challenged for the win.

“In the last few days I have worked a lot on my foot in order to recover from the fracture I suffered in the Superpole race in Catalunya and I feel a bit better,” said Bautista.

“We will see when I get on my bike if I’ll be able to ride well and not feel pain. As for Magny-Cours, it’s not a track where I have a lot of experience, having raced there just once, last year.”

The Magny-Cours track will pose another new and exciting challenge for Team HRC, which fields its CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP2 machines on French soil for the first time and it looks like a cold and wet weekend is waiting.

“It’s quite different to the Catalunya track and we will have to wait and see how our bike will behave. The feeling we had at Barcelona was very positive and we worked well there, especially on the electronics side, the area where we actually can work the most.

“So, we have some ideas for the coming rounds. It looks like the weather will be a bit challenging, wet and cold, conditions that are still quite new for us and so we’ll see how it goes.

“The feeling was not bad in the wet in Catalunya, but temperatures were warmer and that makes quite a difference. Anyway, we hope to find the same positive feeling we had in Catalunya and to be able to continue to develop our bike’s setup.”