Hamilton brushes off reports of MotoGP crash

40

Lewis Hamilton has responded to reports that he crashed Valentino Rossi's MotoGP bike during their long-awaited 'play date' at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo on Monday.

Hamilton was getting an opportunity to try out the top-class Yamaha, with Rossi getting a chance behind the wheel of Hamilton's Mercedes W08 from 2017 in return.

It's Hamilton's first outing on a MotoGP bike having previously carried out some running on a Yamaha R1M Superbike at the end of 2018, while Rossi last had a taste of F1 in 2010.

Rossi preps for Hamilton ride swap with Mercedes

The closed-doors promotional event arranged by the Monster Energy drinks company went ahead as scheduled, but there's been no official report or footage from Mercedes or Yamaha on how the pair of champions fared as they traded places.

Meanwhile a report from Italy's La Repubblica on Wednesday morning suggested that the reason for the radio silence was because Hamilton had ended up crashing during his spell on the track.

The article contained no details of where on the track the crash was supposed to have happened, how serious it was, or what damage might have been done to the motorcycle.

©Instagram

But Hamilton quickly took to social media to rebuff the report and insisted that actually everything had gone very well indeed.

“Morning world!,” Hamilton wrote on Instagram. “Hope everyone is doing great.

“Sorry there’s been no news yet on what me and Valentino have been up to yet but all I can say it was epic," he continued.

“We both did great, no troubles at all and had the best day ever!”

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.