Pedrosa & team in Qatar.

REPSOL Honda’s Dani Pedrosa has revealed he has been suffering from severe arm-pump for a year and may take time out to seek medical advice. 

Pedrosa made his revelation after finishing the MotoGP season opener in sixth position.

Speaking to Motogp.com, the Spaniard said: ‘Basically in this race I had an arm pump issue, which has been there for a whole year.

‘I started to have lots of problems here last year and last year I struggled in every race, I couldn’t really perform well and my results haven’t been that good due to this fact. I have been trying all of this time to fix it and improve, but it wasn’t easy I couldn’t really get any good answers. I went through one surgery but it wasn’t successful.

‘I tried not to talk about it in public, obviously this wasn’t easy, but Honda always knew about it. This winter I was travelling all around the world trying to get different opinions from several doctors. Trying to know if I could have a new surgery in an effort to be ready for the championship.’

It has not yet been confirmed by the Repsol Honda team whether Pedrosa will race at the Circuit of Americas in two weeks’ time. The 29-year-old wants to ‘fix his arm’, but specialists have advised him that further operations carry various risks. 

Pedrosa continued: ‘All of the doctors recommended not having surgery due to the risk, and I tried to follow this advice, and work a lot in a non-aggressive way. This brings me back to today, where we had a bad situation, as I knew I wasn’t feeling very well, but there was no other option for me.

‘Now that the race is over and I can see that I cannot perform as I would like, I have to find a way to solve this problem. I cannot continue racing and performing this way, so my plan now is to try to fix my arm.

‘I don’t know exactly how I will do that, as I said the doctors are unsure, but I will try to get rid of this problem, and the team knows about it. I don’t have too many answers at this moment, everything is quite uncertain, but I hope to have news soon.’

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