JOSH OWENS’ RAPID RECOVERY
After a strong pre-season and solid start to the 2021 Bennetts British Superbike Championship - which saw the 21-year-old running inside the points at Oulton Park - Josh Owens suffered a freak accident at Knockhill, suffering hand injuries that left him fighting to even make the grid again this season. But through grit, determination, and hard work, the former British GP2 champion could be back for the second half of the campaign.
FP2 at Knockhill BSB, Owens crests the rise through the fast left-right chicane on his Rapid CDH Racing Kawasaki. Lap after lap, the bike goes light as the track drops away, something Owens is accustomed to, as he makes slight adjustments with his body position and inputs to compensate.
This time, however, the bike’s more unsettled than normal, catching the young pilot out. As the bike moves around Owens catches his own thumb rear brake lever, locking the back wheel and sending him over the high side.
It’s a small mistake with unfair consequences.
“It was a really strange one,” Owens remembers. “I wasn’t even that knocked about, I was fine other than my hand. I think it got caught up with the ‘bar as the bike went over. But it was a really weird one. If you tried to replicate it again you’d never be able to.
“You never want to be injured, but it’s especially annoying as we had a pretty strong start to the season and a good weekend at Oulton, running inside the points and feeling pretty good.”
After a trip to a local hospital in Scotland that put him in a cast to stop any movement, Owens saw a specialist nearer his native Liverpool. A combination of dislocated and fractured metacarpals meant surgery and the youngster having to have his fingers wired in place.
“It sounds strange but you don’t think about how much you use your hands until you can’t,” Owens continued. “And it’s such a complicated injury because of all the moving parts. I had wires in all fingers, and then one across them, to keep everything in place and let the bones heal. But it’s not just the bones it was my nerves and tendons, there was quite a lot going on.
“I picked up a bit of an infection though, and so had the wires out a week early. That was a bit of a shock. I was expecting something like lockwire, but it was like welding wire, they were the size of tent pegs!”
The wires were followed by another cast, which has, too, since been removed. This was followed by physiotherapy but ultimately, time has become the greatest healer. Owens admits to struggling, mentally, with the injury, at times. But he’s also not one to sit around and wait for things to happen, so as the hand builds strength, he’s been doing everything he can to quicken the pace of his recovery and get back aboard his Rapid CDH Racing ZX-10R.
“It was quite disheartening”, he admits. “I’m a big believer that you need to be active to be positive about life, you need to be out there doing stuff, so the first few days after the injury were tough. It was quite demoralising, depressing even, being stuck at home. And with the season the way it is, quite condensed after Covid, it feels like I’m missing half of the season, instead of a handful of rounds. So it has been hard to keep positive.
“When the cast came off, at that point I was geared up for that being the end of it and getting back to normal, but when it was removed I still couldn’t move my fingers, and I realised there was still a lot to do. That got me quite down again, but I told myself that it was just another step in the recovery process.
“I spent a bit of time in an oxygen chamber, I’ve been trying to eat as well as possible to help things along. I’m not much of a gym person, I much prefer being outdoors and more into cardio and getting the blood flowing - I normally do a lot of cycling and mountain biking - so I’ve been spinning the legs on the turbo trainer at home. Since the cast has been off I’ve been swimming as that’s low impact and helps loosen my fingers and builds my strength back up.
“That’s been another setback. I’ve lost a lot of strength in the arm as I’ve not been able to use my hand. I’m quite broad shouldered and have quite big forearms but my arm, well, there’s not much left of it and my bicep has shrunk. But I’ve not been able to lift weights or do anything like that, so everything now is about building strength, in my hand and my arm.
“It’s going well though. I saw the physio recently and they were shocked at how much movement I’ve got back in my fingers in a short amount of time. Within a week I’d gone from being able to just wiggle my fingers to making a loose fist. That’s normally eight weeks of recover.
“They did have to bend my little finger for me though: I could bend the others but that was stuck, as the build up of scar tissue reduces the movement of the tendons. They said I could wait and let it loosen or they could pull it round. We went for that one. They told me to take a deep breath and then they bent it round.”
Despite showing the desire you’d expect to recover and get back on the bike as quickly as possible, he’s also approaching it with a level head.
“It would have been easy to try and rush back, but it could easily have complicated things further and potentially ended my career. I’m only 21. As much as I really want to get back on the bike, I’ve got to be right.
“I speak to the team a lot and they’re really understanding, they know that no one will have beaten me up more than I’ll have done myself. They know how keen I am but tell me not to rush it. That’s really nice, especially being a relative rookie. I feel like I improved a lot from last season to the start of this, and made a big step with the lap times at Oulton. So to have this setback, you do worry, but they’ve been great.”
There are five rounds left in the Bennetts British Superbike Championship this season, but Owens is aiming to be back before the end of the campaign.
“If progress continues as it has, I want to try at Snetterton,” he says. “I’ve got to pass the BSB medical, too, and I’ll make a final decision soon. But I want to be back this year, definitely.”