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This is not the first time the reigning world champion has been forced to miss the first Grand Prix of the season, as will happen to Jorge Martin in Buriram.
It actually also happened to Kenny Roberts who ran into a nasty crash while testing the 1979 Yamaha YZR500 in Japan in mid-February. Roberts lost the front in a fast right turn on the Yamaha test track near Iwata.
The first reports coming out of Japan were disturbing, in fact Kenny slammed into a guard rail. He broke his twelfth vertebra and suffered compression between the twelfth and thirteenth vertebrae. Doctors also operated on him two days after the accident to repair the damage to his spleen, which required several stitches to control the bleeding.
Early reports, confused between spleen and spine, led to fears for the worst. Roberts remained hospitalized in Japan for three weeks, then returned home but missed both the Daytona 200-mile race and the Venezuelan Grand Prix. He returned in time for the Austrian Grand Prix on the very fast and very dangerous Salzburgring, which he won, beating Virginio Ferrari. At the end of the season, however, he confirmed himself as 500 world champion with 113 points to the 89 of the Suzuki rider who had a bad accident in the very last Grand Prix of the season, at Le Mans.
Another case of a world champion being forced to miss the inaugural Grand Prix of the world championship was that of Freddie Spencer, with a difference: Fast Freddie lined up in practice for the 1984 South African GP, at Kyalami, but crashed due to a broken carbon rear rim on his Honda. It soon became clear that the accident was not caused by a riding error or, as was initially said, by the rim hitting the curb, although it cannot be ruled out that passing over it frequently could have led to its failure.
At the time, the team manager was Yoichi Oguma, who, due to the high regard he held in the paddock, worked to recover the pieces of the shattered rim collected by photographers and journalists. At that time there were no TVs in the press room and it was trackside.
The title at the end of the season went to Eddie Lawson; it was his first world championship. That was also the year of the ill-fated experiment by Honda, which gave Spencer a V4 with an under-engine fuel tank and a 'high' exhaust system covered by a fake tank, something that forced Freddie to line the sleeves of his race suit with asbestos. The wheels were Comstar wheels with carbon spokes. But that's another story.
