The Australian picked up P11 in Indianapolis two weeks after fracturing shoulder blade.
Image: Octopi Media.
Honda HRC’s Hunter Lawrence returned to racing in Indianapolis after missing the Birmingham Supercross due to a fractured scapula he sustained in a crash two weeks ago at Daytona. Battling through the pain in each race of the Triple Crown format, the gritty Australian was able to finish up 11th overall with 10-10-12 scores.
The result is not quite where Lawrence was prior to his injury as expected, but the solid points night helped to keep him right in the fight for a top 10 position in the points. Lawrence now sits on 98 points, just six points back of Malcolm Stewart in 11th, and nine points back of Dylan Ferrandis in 10th who missed Indianapolis with an illness. Despite fighting through the pain to stay in the battle, Lawrence admits the result and performance in Indianapolis was a welcomed sight.
“Super fortunate to not be at home on the couch and be able to ride. I still have a cracked scapula, so it’s not easy riding with a fractured bone,” explained Lawrence. “Two weeks out from that, so it’s just doing what I can, trying not to fall behind. We were really making a lot of progress and moving forward. I don’t want to say consistent, but we were about to pass for fourth in Daytona when we crashed. The two weekends [before] were top fives. I’d like to think we were right there at cracking some consistent top fives and being a top five guy. So, that was really good. Super stoked we didn’t have to have surgery or anything like that, so yeah it was a tough one.”
After missing the opening main event of the season in Anaheim, Hunter Lawrence had been on a steady climb in performance until his crash in Daytona. Along with his back-to-back fifth place finishes in Glendale and Arlington, Lawrence has only finished out of the top 10 one other time than Indianapolis in main events he’s been able to finish.
Indianapolis was a tough round to come back for with the three-race format equaling nearly 40 total minutes of on-track race time as opposed to the normal 28-30 minutes Lawrence would normally see on a regular night of racing. Couple that with the rutted conditions Indianapolis provided and it was far from an easy 11th place finish.
“I have to rest because I rehab it through the week and pretty much, not destroy it, but you do a lot of damage and when that scapula is cracked, it bleeds out,” said Lawrence. “It’s all shoulder and muscles and stuff, so we have to try to stop that and get all the drainage out of it and make it feel good again.”
It won’t get much easier for Lawrence this week as the series heads to Seattle, Washington. Aside from it being the longest flight for Florida-based Lawrence to deal with all year, Seattle typically has dirt that breaks down in a big way similar to Indianapolis. It might be another weekend of Lawrence putting in overtime to wrangle his Honda CRF450R beneath him. However, rain is expected in the forecast. Like we saw earlier this year with Adam Cianciarulo being able to race through a broken hand in the rainy conditions of San Francisco and San Diego, Lawrence could benefit from another muddy race.
The biggest help for Lawrence in his steps toward 100% health is the break in the schedule following the 12th round in St. Louis. As he pushes through this injury to collect solid points, he might just be able to get back to full health coming off the break in early April to really hit the ground running for the final five rounds of the series.
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