Jorge Lorenzo’s win on Sunday has breathed some life back into a championship that was rapidly heading for boredom with the Repsol steam roller flattening the opposition so far this year. Lorenzo showed why he is the champion with a gutsy win and Casey Stoner’s 3rd place showed that there definitely are no team orders at HRC. It’s to be hoped that those 5 points that Pedrosa took off him on Sunday don’t come back to haunt him later in the season. We do need to retain the perspective that Stoner is still more than one win in front with 5 races to go and could finish 2nd to Lorenzo in all of them and still regain the title.The dice for 4th place was a cracker with Simo finally scoring a points victory over arch-rival, Dovizioso. Despite setting the fastest lap of the race, Spies had to be content with a minor placing again, the yawning gap in skill level between him and Lorenzo on nearly identical bikes plain for everyone except the most patriotic American fan to see.
Speaking of Spies, he and Lorenzo tested at Misano yesterday in what was supposed to be a group test but ended up being a private one. Ducati opted to continue testing at Mugello instead (though I’d have thought that building on the obvious advances they made last weekend at Misano would have suggested staying there was a good plan) and Honda decided not to test at all. Spies apparently broke the lap record on the 1000cc bike.
Johann Zarco’s inexplicable stupidity at the finish of the 125cc race has everyone talking, even coining a new word, courtesy of the MotoGpPod web page, “Zarcolepsy. (noun) a condition causing the sufferer to lose concentration and be beaten into second in a 125cc race” 🙂 Wish I’d have thought of that.
The Moto2 race was a belter, as usual, and Bradl is hanging on (just) to his chances of his first championship, though the momentum is clearly with Marquez. If you ignore the fact that the Moto2 bikes are woefully slow in comparison to thoroughbred bikes, then the racing itself is excellent. Oh, and the acquisition of Warren Willing into the MZ team paid immediate dividends with the 2 bikes qualifying in the 20’s instead of the 30’s and Westie running in the points until late in the race where he suddenly tumbled off the leader board. It turns out that a tyre began to go flat because of a porous rim, raising suggestions that this has probably been the cause of Anthony’s late-race lack of pace for the last 5 races or so. Shows what happens if you buy crap parts, I guess.
Over at the Nurbugring, it got very ugly with Charlie Chucka winning the first race easily and Biaggi having 2 DNS’s after hurting his foot. The second race, in appalling wet conditions was allowed to run to 75% race distance so that it could be declared a race and was then promptly red-flagged. Tom Sykes was the surprise winner, the first Kawasaki win in WSBK since Chris “The Stalker” Walker’s win in similarly wet conditions many years ago. Needless to say the riders, most of whom had put their hands up in an effort to get the race stopped immediately, were furious that the demands of the organisers were put above rider safety. I can see some sort of Rider’s Safety Committee being formed here.
And, speaking of Kawasaki, the factory announced yesterday that Paul Bird Motorsport has lost the position of the “factory” team and that Tom Sykes, winner at Nurburgring the day before, would not have his contract renewed. The bad press that occurred after the drugs were discovered in the PBM transporter earlier on in the year has followed them as I suspected it would. Japanese factories are very sensitive about public image and losing “face” is looked upon very very seriously.
Over in Poland (yes, Poland), Aussie Gareth Jones, won both legs of the Polish Superbike Championship race. Jones, who usually competes in the IDM, crossed the border for the outing in Poland causing some wag to suggest that a quick incursion into Poland from Germany had been successful on a previous engagement. 🙂
Wheel bearings and swingarm bearings have arrived for the Shadowfax so another little step along the way has been taken.
Finally, courtesy of one of my Facebook friends, this joke, I thought it was goo.
“Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with that expensive double-pane energy efficient kind, and today, I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.
Helloooo,…………just because I’m blonde doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid.
So, I told him just what his fast talking sales guy had told me last year, that in ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves!
It’s been a year I told him. There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up. He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot.”