Valentino Rossi struggled to 12th place on Friday in practice for the German MotoGP round at the Sachsenring, injuring his right arm during a morning practice crash.

The Ducati Team rider is optimistic about improving upon his 12th-best time, which was due in part to the effects of the crash in the first 45-minute session that forced him to make a quick trip to the mobile clinic to treat a deep abrasion on his right arm and a blow to his chin.

In the afternoon, he was forced to leave his bike at the side of the track after it automatically shut off due to a small pebble that remained stuck from the crash, and he had to finish the session on his second bike.

“This morning’s crash caused a hole in my right arm that looks like a little anatomy lesson because you can see ‘inside’ as far as the muscle, but I also took a hit on my shoulder – the right one, which was operated on, and which now hurts a little,” he explained.

“It’s nothing too bad, and I wasn’t really affected much today. Let’s hope that’s also true for tomorrow, especially the shoulder. We did lose some time for working on the bike’s setup, also because I got stranded in the second session.

“It wasn’t due to technical troubles but rather to a small bit of debris that was stuck, causing a precautionary engine shutdown. I think that tomorrow we’ll be able to improve because we’re working on a setting that’s halfway between the Mugello one and the standard one, and we think it will be good for this track.

“At the moment we’re losing a lot of time in some sections because although the rear of the GP11.1 is much more stable under acceleration, which is important, we still haven’t found a good balance with the front. If we manage to find a compromise, I’ll be able to do much better.”

Rossi’s best lap of 1:23.533 was over a second off the pace of Marco Simoncelli’s quickest of the session at 1:22.225.