While the dust has well and truly settle from this year’s Island Classic, the repercussions continue on with my good friends at MotoPod publishing my 10 interviews in the last two episodes of the internet radio programme. If you’d like to hear them all, log on to www.motorpocast.com and either listen to or download episodes 547 and 548 to hear what went down.
The photo above is of my good friend, Ralphie Hudson (he’s the guy on the right) and my other good friend, Margaret Swims who is seen here chatting with Ralph. While the bare bones of what happened to Ralph in 2017 are now pretty well known, It was great to sit down with Ralph and let him tell the Bolivia story from his perspective. The interview is nearly an hour long but well worth listening to. Unfortunately I cannot embed it here because of its size so you’ll have to listen to it from MotoPod.
It also needs to be added that Ralph’s decision to lend his “big” bike to fellow Team USA rider, Jason Pridmore, turned to gold with JP getting 3 4th place finishes and also setting the fastest lap of all the team. He’ll be back.
In other news, the bombshell of the Silly Season was dropped during the week with Herve Poncheral announcing that he was terminating Tech III’s contract with Yamaha at the end of season 2018. While it was a surprise, it makes sense once you recover from the shock. Rossi is going to retire (hopefully) soon and he will already be making plans for his own MotoGp team. Obviously he will want to be a quasi-works Yamaha team and the room is just not there for Yamaha to supply three teams. For all of Poncheral’s protestations that the decision was his, you may be certain that Yamaha have leant hard on him to quit so they can accommodate Rossi’s ambitions. It will be Yamaha’s loss, of course as they will now not be able to continue with the services of Zarco. Where will Tech III go? The smart money is that they will switch to KTM to either be a works-supported team or to actually RUN the factory effort. In any event, they will BE a factory team rather than a satellite team as they have always been with Yamaha, the poor relations.
I’m not getting a lot of riding down lately. My wife has continued to be troubled by an over-active thyroid and this is resulting in lots of tests, lots of visits to specialists here there and everywhere and the prospect of major surgery to remove the thyroid sooner rather than later. She’s tough, but I do have to say that it’s wearing her down. Hopefully it’s sorted soon.