A video of how to ride a motorcycle for the first time.

The march of the seasons may well be Mother Nature's way of bringing balance to our hurried and stressful modern lives, but to motorcycle racing fans, it is a maddening annoyance. The onset of wet and windy fall, and the long, dark night of winter, calls an aggravating and nigh-on interminable halt to racing for month upon month.

As recompense for such cruel and unnatural punishment, we are given preseason testing. Riders and teams rack up enough frequent flyer miles to qualify for the next Apollo mission as they jet around the warmer parts of the world in their relentless quest for more speed, better bikes and the upper hand once racing resumes. This generates a flurry of news stories, lap times and above all, speculation about the relative pecking order on the MotoGP grid. But, like diet foods and low alcohol beer, it is a very poor substitute for the real thing.

Thankfully, one day in March, all that empty talk and hot air comes to an end, and we finally get back to the thing we all love so much: the best riders in the world harrying the world's most sophisticated racing motorcycles around a racetrack. In 2007, that hot air of speculation dissolved in the hot, desert air of Losail, the desolate Qatari track kicking off what was to be a remarkable season. For 2008, in an attempt to avoid the scorching Arabian sun, the race was switched to run at night, under a technological marvel of modern lighting.

Lights! Camera! Action!

This single change had a bigger change on the event than many had expected. While testing had shown Michelin had narrowed much of the gap between themselves and Bridgestone during the winter, the difference in test times more down to machinery and talent rather than tire make, the strange night time conditions in the desert threw all that up in the air. In the early evening, when track and air temperatures were warmer, the Bridgestones held their ground, evenly matched with the Michelins, which had been built especially for the race using data collected at the tests the previous week. But in the late night sessions, run at the same time the race was due to be held, it was Michelin which ruled the roost, adapting far better to the cold night temperatures than the Bridgestones.

The exception to the rule was of course Casey Stoner. Apparently still in possession of the get-out-of-the-laws-of-physics-free card he had picked up last year, the young Australian world champion continued his relentless domination of the timesheets, all the way into qualifying. Were we on the way to yet another whitewash by Mr Perfect? Judging from the timesheets, that possibility was very much on the cards.

Fortunately for the spectacle, Stoner wasn't getting it all his own way. The entrance of four rookies - including three world champions - into the top class had generated a lot of excitement at the start of the season, and testing had shown that they were quick to get up to speed. During the first sessions that really counted, they proved that the excitement had not been premature.

Repeat Performance?

Foremost among the rookies was Jorge Lorenzo. The reigning 250 champion was fast in every session of practice, running Stoner close every time. And during qualifying, the Spaniard stamped his authority very firmly on proceedings, smashing his Fiat Yamaha team mate's previous pole record by over a second. For a rookie to grab the pole on his first attempt struck a chord: the last time that happened was 1998, and another 250 world champion in the shape of Max Biaggi then went on to win the race, and finish 2nd in the championship.

Lorenzo's pole confirmed not only the strength of the new entrants, but also the speed of the Yamahas, a point underlined by the Tech 3 Yamaha team of James Toseland and Colin Edwards filling out the front row. Casey Stoner was the first non-Yamaha man, putting his Ducati on the front of the second row, with the Hondas of Randy de Puniet and Nicky Hayden alongside him, the Michelins providing a clearly superior qualifying tire.

Valentino Rossi, who had used up a lot of his political capital procuring a switch to Bridgestones over the winter, could only manage 7th, and last of the Yamahas, ahead of Honda's Dani Pedrosa, still in pain from a broken hand he'd picked up at the first test of 2008 in Sepang. If  anyone can stop Casey Stoner from sweeping the series like last year, it will be Pedrosa and Rossi, but starting from the third row of the grid was a poor start to preventing that.

Shot In The Dark

As the red lights dimmed, and 4,000 horsepower roared off the line and into the night, Dani Pedrosa demonstrated that a third row start need not be such a disadvantage. While Casey Stoner had got his usual rocketship launch, Pedrosa had left the line like the Starship Enterprise, threading his way past the constellation of MotoGP stars and into Turn 1 at the head of the pack, ahead of Colin Edwards and Casey Stoner.

Jorge Lorenzo, who'd got away from the line well enough, was left watching James Toseland slip up the inside and into 4th, while Stoner ran a little wide, allowing Toseland and Lorenzo back ahead of him, nullifying the gains the reigning champ had made off the line. Into Turn 4, Stoner suffered the further ignominy of seeing Valentino Rossi slide up the inside, and into 5th. They rounded the track as a bunch, Pedrosa barely able to pull a gap on the rest of the field, and headed back towards the front straight, heading for the line for the first time.

The watching crowd held its breath as the riders fired out of the last corner and along the straight, memories of last year's Ducati demolition job fresh in their minds. But Honda and Yamaha had learnt a thing or two since their humiliation here at the hands of the tiny Bologna factory in 2007. Casey Stoner pulled out of Valentino Rossi's draft at the end of the straight, but  was a far cry off being able to motor past on horsepower alone. He could almost draw equal with Rossi, but he could not get past.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

The losers down the straights were Edwards and Toseland, aboard the conventional Yamaha engine. Both Tech 3 men were forced to sit idly by as the raw power of Jorge Lorenzo's pneumatic valve engine flew past their coil spring version, and into 2nd place just ahead of them. Hammering into Turn 1, Toseland took advantage of Lorenzo's move to dive underneath his team mate Edwards, to take over 3rd.

The World Superbike champion's move was a good one, giving him the outside line around Turn 2. This lined him up nicely for Turn 3, where JT spotted the merest sliver of floodlights underneath Lorenzo's Fiat Yamaha. In a rather optimistic move indicative of Toseland's newness in the category, the Tech 3 man dived up the inside into Turn 3, but found Lorenzo already turning in to slam the door in his face. The pair bashed fairings, but stayed on board, Toseland getting the better of the brutal action and pinching 2nd.

While Toseland was beating up Lorenzo, behind them, their team mates were reversing the situation, with Valentino Rossi slicing smoothly inside Edwards, putting his former team mate between himself and Casey Stoner. With Edwards behind him, The Doctor could concentrate on his new team mate, and started to close on Jorge Lorenzo. He pushed through the tight loop for Turns 5 through 10, before stuffing his Yamaha up inside Lorenzo going into Turn 12, to take over 3rd spot.

Rossi's forward charge was a wise move on his part, as he had the reigning champ breathing hard down his neck. Casey Stoner had followed Rossi past Edwards, and was latching on to the former champion, only to see his intentions thwarted by Rossi's move on Lorenzo. As the second lap neared its end, Stoner knew he had a fight on his hands.

The melee behind him had allowed Dani Pedrosa to pull out the start of a lead. The Spaniard crossed the line over a second ahead, with three Yamahas and a Ducati chasing. Riding with a painful hand, the lead meant that Pedrosa could concentrate on being smooth and fast, and spare his hand a fraction, giving him a better chance of lasting the race. For the question surely was, how well would his battered hand hold up?

Rude Boys

Down the front straight, James Toseland was the big loser once again, his satellite Yamaha clearly short on steam. From 2nd at the start of the straight, JT was almost down to 5th a kilometer later, as the more powerful bikes flew by. But the Englishman was not to be so easily outdone, and breaking hard into Turn 1, snuck back ahead of Stoner, and kept on Lorenzo's tail.

This left Casey Stoner with a problem. Now past Lorenzo, Valentino Rossi was flying and off to chase down Pedrosa. Stoner was stuck with two determined Yamahas ahead of him, and was being joined by another determined rookie, Andrea Dovizioso on the Team Scot Honda, from behind. Stoner needed to move, and he started to push Toseland, getting close enough to dive up the inside into Turn 12 and get on to start chasing Lorenzo. Toseland tried to come back on Stoner at Turn 13, but the champion held his line, and kept JT at bay.

This time, as the bikes hammered down the straight and towards Turn 1, Stoner finally got his Ducati launched out of Lorenzo's draft, and into 3rd place.  But the right-left-right combination of Turns 1, 2 and 3 meant that Lorenzo could hold his outside line at Turn 1, and cut across back ahead of Stoner into 2, leaving the champion back where he started, with his main rivals for the title checking out at the front, and Rossi's team mate blocking his chase.

For the next lap, Valentino Rossi hunted Dani Pedrosa down, taking back half a second a lap. By the time they hit the tight hairpin on lap 5, Rossi was right on Pedrosa's tail, with Lorenzo and Stoner closing from behind. The Doctor lined Pedrosa up through the long shallow left hander of Turn 11, to dive up the inside at Turn 12 once again, and into the lead.

More Than This

As Pedrosa had found out, leading was nowhere near enough.  The front four were still tightly bunched, and after flashing across the line in close order, they fanned out nearly four abreast for Turn 1. Unlike last year, however, the four bikes and riders were pretty evenly matched, and nobody could gain enough advantage to shuffle the deck. Rossi, Pedrosa, Lorenzo and Stoner left the straight as they had entered, in tight formation.

On lap 6 and lap 7, the four men railed around the track as if chained together. Each pushed the man in front, but none could gain enough purchase to force his way ahead. The ensuing dogfight allowed Andrea Dovizioso to catch the leaders and join the fray, while behind Dovizioso, James Toseland drew closer, with Colin Edwards not far behind.

The front pack pushed and jostled, feinting one way, then trying again on the other side, but no man could gain an advantage. Then, as they headed into the last turn on lap 7, Jorge Lorenzo finally made his move, swiping inside Dani Pedrosa, almost hitting the Repsol Honda as he forced his way past. Onto the straight they flew, and Pedrosa was sworn to revenge. Tucked behind Lorenzo, he whipped out of the draft as they crossed the line, dragging Casey Stoner along in his wake.

Three abreast, they hit the braking zone for Turn 1. Lorenzo hit the apex first, with Stoner and Pedrosa side by side. But Stoner had the inside line and held the advantage. As they peeled into Turn 1, there was no room for Pedrosa, and the Spanish title hopeful was forced wide, losing 3rd place to Stoner, and almost conceding 4th to Dovizioso, who had craftily drafted the bickering threesome down the straight.

Once clear of Pedrosa, the reigning world champion decided it was time to make his move. He bore down on Lorenzo throughout the lap, until the group reached the tight left at Turn 10. Then, in a carbon copy of the move Rossi had put on Pedrosa, Stoner dived up the inside into Turn 12, to take over 2nd.

The Doctor was in trouble, and he knew it. He had been unable to drop Pedrosa or Lorenzo, despite leading for the past two laps. As the group entered the final turn onto the home straight, Casey Stoner hit the apexes just right, got drive out of the turn, and swept past Valentino Rossi along the straight. It could have been 2007 all over again.

Into The Night

Now, free of any obstacles, Mr Perfect could work his magic. Stoner put his head down, and started to charge, starting on a long series of blistering laps.  But Stoner was not alone. Behind the Australian, Jorge Lorenzo had dispensed with his Fiat Yamaha team mate, cheekily diving up the inside into the hairpin of Turn 6, and was matching Stoner almost lap for lap. On lap 9, Lorenzo was a few hundredths faster than Stoner, and on the following lap, a few hundredths slower. There was nothing between the pair of them, as Lorenzo stalked Stoner for the next couple of laps.

On lap 13, Stoner pushed on once, suddenly taking a tenth of a second from Lorenzo, and opening up the merest smidgeon of twilight between them. Then, on lap 14, Stoner really put the hammer down, setting a new lap record nearly 1.4 seconds faster than his own record from last year, and Lorenzo was done. At first, the Spaniard conceded only a tenth or so a lap, but soon those single tenths became multiple tenths, and then half a second, then almost a second a lap. The race was run.

Casey Stoner crossed the line to start his 2008 MotoGP season in similar style to the way he started 2007. The margin of victory was greater, and no less emphatic. Once past the men in front, he had ridden another signature race, lapping smoothly and consistently to tear the field apart. It was another awesome display of what this young champion is capable of.

Yet despite his dominance, there was hope for those behind. Unlike many of the races last season, Stoner had not just disappeared the moment the flag had dropped and settled the race within a few corners. For the first half of the race, Stoner had been forced to fight for every yard, facing considerable resistance all the way. It was only once he had a clear track in front of him that he came into his own. Stoner is still very clearly the man to beat, but on the evidence of Qatar, there is a chance that he can at least be beaten.

My Boy Lollipop

Behind Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo cruised home alone to a magnificent 2nd. Unable to match Mr Perfect's string of mid 1'55 laps to the end, Lorenzo's own pace was a paragon of consistency, running high 1'55s, then low 1'56s to the line. His dream of matching Max Biaggi's astonishing debut achievement of taking both pole and the race win on his first outing may have fallen just short of reality, but it wasn't a long way short. Considering the opposition Lorenzo faced, it was truly an awe-inspiring accomplishment.

After both Stoner and Lorenzo had passed Rossi, he was clearly starting to struggle. The 7-time world champion was backing up traffic behind, collecting an entourage consisting of Dani Pedrosa on the Repsol Honda, Andrea Dovizioso on the Team Scot Honda, and James Toseland on the Tech 3 Yamaha. Toseland's team mate Colin Edwards hung close behind, but was the first to fade, unable to follow the pace of the men fighting for 3rd.

Dani Pedrosa had not yet given up on chasing Lorenzo and Stoner. But he had a Doctor-sized obstacle in his path, and found his attempts to pass being thwarted at every turn. By now Valentino Rossi's Bridgestone tires were past their prime, and Rossi's lines were starting to widen. At every corner, there was the merest hint of a gap up the inside, but each time Pedrosa poked his nose inside, Rossi repelled him. Along the front straight, Pedrosa attempt to draw level and pass, but despite Pedrosa's vastly improved braking ability, Rossi would be back in front on the brakes going into Turn 1.

But if at first you don't succeed, try and try again. For 3 laps, Pedrosa tried and failed. As they exited the final turn to head towards the finish line for the 14th time, Pedrosa finally succeeded, getting better drive out of the corner, and firing ahead of Rossi across the line. By the time they reached the braking area, Pedrosa was too far ahead, and out of Rossi's reach.

No Pain, No Gain

Although he was now past Rossi, it had taken Pedrosa too long to get there. By now, Stoner and Lorenzo were over 5 seconds ahead, out of reach, and too fast to catch. Dani Pedrosa had ridden a remarkable race through a great deal of pain, and swapped back and forth between the '07 Honda and the '08 Honda in the pursuit of a bike good enough to win, but come up just short. A 3rd place was all Pedrosa could manage, but it was an outstanding result under the circumstances, and a warning that once he is healthy, the Spaniard is taking his title fight deadly serious in 2008.

Forced to let first Lorenzo, then Stoner, and now Pedrosa past, Valentino Rossi was determined not to concede any more places in the season opener. With his tires having given their best, The Doctor was left to fight off two class rookies for 4th place. Less than a second covered the three men for the rest of the race, with Rossi leading, parrying every attack that came from Andrea Dovizioso behind, while James Toseland prodded away at Dovizioso, in the hope of stealing 5th.

On lap 20, Dovizioso finally got close enough to Rossi to stuff his satellite Honda up the inside of Rossi into Turn 6, and snatch 4th away. But the Italian veteran would not be denied so easily, and once again, Rossi waited for the long left hander at Turn 11, before cutting off the pass for Dovi at Turn 12, and taking back 4th spot.

Dovizioso, though, had the wild recklessness of youth, the excitement of his first race in the MotoGP class, and a lack of title aspirations on his side. The Italian rookie, having sniffed the delights of 4th place, went on a do-or-die mission, flinging his bike into the turns in an attempt to get close to or ahead of Rossi absolutely everywhere. Dovi ran wide at Turn 1 on the last lap, then had a big slide a couple of turns later, before finally risking it all by slamming his Honda up the inside of The Doctor into the tight left of Turn 10. Rossi, livid at losing another place, tried the outside line through Turn 11 to steal back up the inside at Turn 12, but this time, he'd asked too much of his tires. Rossi ran wide, allowing Dovizioso to cut back underneath and into 4th place.

Revenge Of The Rookies

Rossi chased again through the final turns, but his attempt to nip out of Dovizioso's draft and ahead came just a few yards short, and Andrea Dovizioso held on to 4th position by less than two hundredths of a second, forcing Valentino Rossi down into 5th, and costing The Doctor a couple of valuable championship points. Dovizioso was elated, never having dreamed that he could dice with Valentino Rossi to the end in his first MotoGP race, but a remarkable showing, and his experience chasing round the dog-slow Honda 250 last year, stood the rookie in good stead.

James Toseland crossed the line just a few tenths behind Rossi, to make it 3 rookies in the top 6. The reigning World Superbike champion had struggled on the straights, his conventional, spring valve engine Yamaha obviously short of outright top speed compared with the newer Yamahas and the Hondas. But a barnstorming ride round the twisty back section of the circuit had always kept him in contention. In the end, and despite showing both Dovizioso and Rossi a wheel every now and again, JT decided to play safe, and take 6th place, an excellent result for the man coming from World Superbikes, the series which is supposed to be a blind alley for those wishing to move to MotoGP.

Toseland's Tech 3 Yamaha team mate Colin Edwards came home 7th, just a second behind, after being unable to close the gap to the three men running ahead of him. Edwards' fortunes have definitely improved, now he is free of the burden of doing the donkey work as Valentino Rossi's team mate, and once the Tech 3 team get the new Yamaha engines at Estoril in two races time, both Edwards and Toseland could be a much more serious threat.

The next man home was Suzuki's Loris Capirossi in 8th, just managing to fend off LCR Honda's Randy de Puniet after a battle which had lasted for most of the second half of the race.

The Stragglers

The pair had had company from Repsol Honda's Nicky Hayden for much of the race, who had never managed to hit his stride on race tires, despite a good qualifying performance on the '07 RC212V. Speculation and conjecture had surrounded the Repsol garage from Thursday afternoon, when the '07 bikes were seen being unpacked and prepared for the race. Both Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden swapped back and forth between the '07 and '08 bikes, trying to get a feel for which bike would work better. Pedrosa had elected to ride the new bike, while Hayden stayed with the old bike, which turned out to be the wrong decision, after finishing 7 places behind his team mate, in 10th spot.

Casey Stoner's team mate Marco Melandri came home in 11th, not a place the Italian would have expected to finish when he signed to join the team which dominated last year. But Melandri, like Capirossi before him, is finding out that it isn't the bike that's doing all that winning, it really is Casey Stoner. Melandri was mildly relieved, however, as during practice, he had been running round in 14th spot, while in the race, he had fought his way up through the field from 15th, offering at least a hint of progress.

John Hopkins was one of the men Melandri had passed, the American fighting a losing battle against the pain in his injured leg. His first outing on the otherwise promising Kawasaki was never destined to be glorious after Hopper suffered a nasty groin injury in preseason testing, and we won't get to see his potential until after his injury heals.

Hopkins managed to hold off Shinya Nakano, forcing the Gresini Honda rider down into 13th. Nakano is still fighting to come to terms with the Honda, but at least is doing better on the Bridgestones than the Michelins he had under him last year.

Behind Nakano, the duel of the Alice Ducati satellite team was won by Toni Elias, who had retaken 14th spot from Sylvain Guintoli two laps from the end. Neither man has adapted well to the Ducati, and their places in the race reflected their places in testing.

The same is true for Ant West. So much was expected of West when he joined Kawasaki, but ever since testing started, the Australian has run around at the back of the field. At Qatar, that's pretty much where he stayed.

He did manage to stay ahead of his compatriot Chris Vermeulen, but that was more down to a destroyed front tire on Vermeulen's Rizla Suzuki, which forced Vermeulen to pit for a new tire, than any strength on West's part. Vermeulen's poor start to the season was more down to bad luck, than anything else.

Rubber Rings

Vermeulen's destroyed tire was part of a bigger pattern, though. After Bridgestone did so well last year, taking the title, and most of the top 10 championship places, the Japanese tire company were expected to dominate again this year. Not so at Qatar, however. Seven out of the top ten riders were on Michelins, the exceptions being Casey Stoner, who is seemingly impervious to any tire problems, Valentino Rossi, who is still getting used to the Japanese tires, and remains one of the very best riders in the world, and Loris Capirossi, who in 8th kept only two Michelin riders behind him. The cold and damp conditions and Michelin's specially built tires poured cold water on all and any previous expectations. Whether Michelin have turned their operation around so much as to regain their grip over the MotoGP class, or whether the Qatar race was an aberration based on the strange conditions remains to be seen. But on the results so far, the score is 1-0 for Michelin.

Michelin's resurgence also pointed to another hopeful trend. Despite Mr Perfect having won the race with a bigger margin this year than last, Stoner really had to work for this victory. By lap 6, Stoner's win was looking anything but inevitable, with the rookies showing no deference to world champions new or old. As the gaps in performance between the bikes continue to narrow, the races will continue to get closer. And Casey Stoner will go from unbeatable to fair game.

For the running battles Stoner was forced to engage in point to the way to beat the young Australian. Once Casey Stoner gets ahead and can concentrate on his own riding, without fear of finding someone slamming into the side of him, he is probably the fastest rider in the world at the moment. But get in Stoner's way and hold him up, forcing him to slug it out with the rest, and he is a lot less comfortable, and not nearly as fast.

Of course, the problem with this thesis is that Casey Stoner still managed to fight his way from 6th through to the lead, including dispatching Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa and Valentino Rossi in a single lap. Just because Stoner is at his best when he's running on his own, it doesn't mean he isn't brilliant when he's forced to elbow his way to the front.

The Times, They Are a-Changing?

With the exception of Casey Stoner, each of the new riders in a team managed to beat their established team mates. In the case of Jorge Lorenzo and James Toseland, they managed to beat their team mates in their first race in MotoGP. With Alex de Angelis ahead of Shinya Nakano until he crashed out of the race, the young guns have clearly swaggered into town, and are sitting in people's chairs.

If you look at the result of the race at Qatar in isolation, the picture of MotoGP looks pretty much the same as last year, with Casey Stoner getting yet another runaway victory. But scratch beneath the surface, and there's plenty of change afoot. Both Stoner's and Pedrosa's bikes ran out of fuel on their way back into pit lane, suggesting that Ducati and Honda are using pretty much every drop of the 21 liters of fuel available to them, and that their machines are closer to being on equal terms. The rookies showed the veterans no respect, and barged and charged their way to the front, making the regulars work for their results. And Casey Stoner's 5 second victory may look easy on paper, but the world champion had to work a lot harder than he has had to in recent races.

What's more, just behind Stoner was a howling pack all banging fairings and racing their hearts out. The spectacle is back in MotoGP, at least in part, and it looks like getting better. Our Christmas wishes may yet come true.

MotoGP Qatar 2008 Race Results

Championship standings after the 2008 MotoGP Qatar round

At last. The long winter break is over, and a new day dawns on MotoGP with the season opener at the Losail circuit in Qatar. Although it's not so much a new day as a new night, as MotoGP, in its continuing  struggle to win fans over from other forms of motorsport, has scooped Formula 1 to stage the very first night race in motorsports. The fact that racing has been running under the lights for years in the US is being conveniently overlooked, as most Europeans remain blissfully unaware of NASCAR and other forms of stock car racing, and so to Dorna, it's the very first night race.

As pleasing as outwitting Bernie Ecclestone must have been to Dorna's wily CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, beating Formula 1 into the history books was not the main motivation behind the move to run under the lights. For the Qatar circuit is a bit of a paradox: on the one hand, it is perfectly situated for motorcycle racing, out in the wilds and far away from any neighbors who may be inclined to complain; but on the other hand, being stuck in the desert, and in one of the hottest and driest regions on the planet, with nary a hint of cloud cover to check the power of the sun, the sand and soaring track temperatures conspire to ravage tires and wreck grip, making tire selection almost impossible, and baking overworked engines. The lack of neighbors may be great, but the destroyed tires, overheating motors and slippery surface are the very opposite.

Dorna's answer to Qatar's conundrum is to run the race at night. With the heat of the sun gone and the offshore breeze dying back as the land cools, conditions should be much more suited for racing. That's the theory. And as with all theory, there's plenty of practical problems to complicate what would otherwise be a simple and elegant idea, some of which were foreseen, and some of which weren't; some of which can and have been solved, some of which haven't.

For a start, there's the most obvious problem with a night race: it tends to be dark. Now that's not usually a problem for the heroes of endurance racing, but MotoGP is run at a much higher pace, and the bikes are all way too compact to find a spot to fit headlamps. But as the Qatar Motor and Motorcycle Federation are richer than Croesus on $100-a-barrel oil, they naturally have a better solution. The Losail circuit hired the US company Musco to erect a multi-million dollar, and multi-million watt lighting installation, similar to the systems they have installed at US Speedways, including Daytona^[1]. The lighting is a remarkable feat of engineering, winning near unanimous praise from the riders.

The Unexpected

But while Losail has plenty of local midnight oil to burn to light up the track, there remain a few significant problems. The first, which only reared its head at the night tests a week ago, is the problem of temperature. As anyone who's been out in the desert knows, once the sun drops behind the horizon, the mercury heads in the same direction, and fast. Losail's location not far from the Persian Gulf makes the temperature difference less extreme than would have been the case if the racetrack had been built further inland, but the one thing that few people had taking into account was the track temperature.

Normally, even on an overcast day, the track temperature will be several degrees warmer than the ambient air temperature, as the sun's rays, however feeble, are absorbed by the dark tarmac. When you run at night, however, there is no sun at all to warm the asphalt, and consequently, track temperatures are generally identical to the ambient air temperatures, in the mid to low teens centigrade, or high fifties fahrenheit. That is colder than most dry races are ever run at, and much closer to the track temperatures you'd expect at a rain-soaked race in Donington or Assen, rather than a dry race in the middle of the desert.

Of course, if it does rain, then all bets are off. The signals are confused about exactly what they would do, with Carmelo Ezpeleta telling Spanish journalists that they would have to ride the next day, and the Losail circuit saying that the race would be brought forward to Sunday afternoon if there was the slightest chance of rain in the evening. For if it does rain, the lights, which have been especially designed to avoid shining into the riders' eyes, and allowing them to ride normally, would then start to reflect viciously off the water on the track, blinding the riders, and making racing impossibly dangerous.

Both situations will cause the tire companies a great deal of grief. In the more likely scenario of the race going ahead in the evening, Michelin seems to have the upper hand, the riders on French rubber complaining less about a lack of grip than the riders with Bridgestones. But everyone is worried, the only small mercy being the expansion of the tire quotas from 31 to 40 for this year.

Back To The Future

Repsol Honda seem to be having the worst problems, however, as they have shipped in several of the bikes they finished the 2007 season on, with the 2008 chassis apparently suffering an appalling lack of grip in the very cold conditions. The last time Honda used bikes from the previous year was at the Nurburgring back in 1984, when Freddie Spencer opted to use the "old" V3 engine, instead of the radical new V4, back in the old 500 two-stroke days. It didn't work out too badly, then, with Spencer taking both the pole and the win on the outdated bike, an outcome HRC must surely be hoping to repeat on Sunday.

Whether history repeats itself for Honda remains to be seen, but now that the preseason testing is over,  the Qatar race certainly looks like being a case of deja vu. Last year's race started with three men slugging it out, hot favorite Valentino Rossi swapping blows with the man who would be champion, Dani Pedrosa, and the man who actually did become champion, Casey Stoner. Pedrosa soon had to let Stoner and Rossi go, as he struggled with a lack of front end feel from his dismal Honda. But at the front, a thrilling duel was fought out, illustrating perfectly the two different approaches taken by Yamaha and Ducati. Around Qatar's intricate and difficult back section, Valentino Rossi took maximum advantage of the Yamaha's extraordinary handling, but as the bikes hit the front straight, Casey Stoner opened the taps on his Ducati GP7 and blew by everything in his path. Looking at the lapchart, Stoner led every single lap of the race, but that does not tell the whole story. Rossi was ahead of Stoner for perhaps half of the race, but only around the back of the track, and not where it counts.

Same Old Same Old?

This year's race is likely to be very similar. Casey Stoner has gotten better and better, been the fastest when the chips are down in testing, and perhaps far more disturbingly, has usually been the first rider to pack up shop and go back to the hotel every day, a sure sign that Stoner and Ducati have gotten through their test work and having nothing left to do. Stoner is ready, and if you thought Mr Perfect was perfect last year, just wait till this season.

The man who is determined to get in his way isn't doing so badly either. Valentino Rossi hasn't dominated the published timesheets during testing, preferring instead to spend time working on racing setup for his new Bridgestone tires. And when it comes to race times, Rossi has been very strong indeed. The Yamaha is still obviously down on top end power compared to the Ducati, although they have definitely closed the gap. But by the same token, Ducati have been working on getting extra drive out of corners, and on some stability and maneurerability issues, making the bike handle a little better.

All will be revealed on Sunday, probably on the first lap, as the Ducati fires down the front straight and the Yamaha and Honda try to hang on. If Rossi can get in the Ducati's draft, and not lose too much ground to Stoner, then The Doctor could be in with a chance at a track he got pole on last year.

Of course, it's not just a two-horse race. The Hondas will be chasing hard too, with a host of riders looking capable of competing. Both Repsol Hondas should be competitive, and both Hayden and Pedrosa have been very fast on qualifiers, though less fast on race tires. Their competitiveness could come down to which bike they elect to run, and how well Pedrosa's broken hand holds up. But there are more Hondas than just Repsol, and one man could just throw up a surprise. Randy de Puniet has astounded everyone in the preseason, having been blisteringly fast on the LCR Honda during testing. We have long known that de Puniet can be fast, but that's never been his problem: his problem is staying on the bike. If de Puniet can cease throwing the machinery at the scenery, then the young Frenchman could cause quite an upset.

The Young Ones

But what the crowds really want to see are the rookies. MotoGP has received a welcome injection of young blood this year, and all of the rookies have been fast. The first question we hoped to see answered is the duel between Jorge Lorenzo and Andrea Dovizioso. Last year, Dovi managed to make Lorenzo's life very difficult, despite being on vastly inferior machinery. This year, the Italian is only on slightly inferior equipment, and will be hungry for revenge. Lorenzo, for his part, will want to make his mark on the series, and get a good finish to establish his place in the hierarchy, which he feels is really at the very pinnacle.

Meanwhile, there's James Toseland. Toseland will be under a lot of pressure from the British press and fans to do well, and judging by testing, and the steady improvement he's shown, we can expect a solid year from the British two-time World Superbike champion. Ironically, while all the focus will be on JT, Britain has its best chance of seeing a world champion in the support classes, with young Bradley Smith dominating the 125 series during preseason testing. Smith is serious, level-headed and very, very talented. What's more he's on one of the fastest bikes in the 125 paddock. Bradley could well be joining Toseland in the premier class in a few short years' time.

The opening round of MotoGP at Qatar is always a strange affair, poorly attended, and at a circuit miles from anywhere. Lighting the whole track up and running it at night can hardly make the event any more other worldly than it already is. But as surreal as the event feels, there is one cold, hard fact that remains: this is the MotoGP season opener. At Qatar, the talking stops as the flag drops, and speculation will be left blowing in the desert wind like tumbleweed. Racing's here again, and it's about time.

^[1] For some background on the Musco lighting used, read Rusty's article on lighting up US racing.

As the final few days count down before the first MotoGP race of 2008, and the tension and excitement starts to swell inside the breast of motorcycle racing fans, it's hard not to get carried away at the prospect of a brand new season. And there is much to get excited about: the entry of some of the most exciting young rookies into motorcycle racing's premier class; the first title defense for another new champion; and a slew of riders and, more importantly, manufacturers out to avenge themselves for last year.

But with that thrill of excitement comes the painful memories of that very same feeling of excitement from last year, and the way it was so brutally crushed by the total dominance of one man and one machine in 2007. It started well, at the nail-biting opener at Qatar, with Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa harrying Casey Stoner all the way to the finish. But that same race highlighted the relative weaknesses which would emerge to squeeze the excitement out of the championship in just a few short races: while Rossi was fast through turns, once the bikes hit the front straight, the Yamaha was just plain embarrassed down the drag to the first turn, both the Ducati and the Honda being considerably faster than Rossi's nimble M1. The Honda, though managing a reasonable turn of speed, was absolutely no match for the Ducati, and what's worse, Honda's overeager pursuit of agility had pushed the engine up too high, putting too much weight over the front wheel under braking, leaving all of the Honda riders to complain about a lack of front end feel and stability on the brakes. The Ducati, on the other hand, was nimble enough to stay with the others round the twists and turns of the rear of the circuit, while destroying all-comers on drag race to the finish line.

Or rather, one Ducati was capable of staying with the others, as the other Ducatis were stuck firmly mid-pack, floundering with the rest of the clearly underdeveloped 800 cc contenders. Add to this the introduction of a tire quota, which Michelin got humiliatingly wrong for much of the season, and a reduction in fuel limits, leaving engineers guessing just how much gas they could use over the course of a race, and the interest had been slowly drained from the series by the time the summer break ended.

So along with the excitement at the imminent arrival of the 2008 season, there's also some trepidation. With Casey Stoner still so fast, are we in for another year of disappointment, of processional races where the only unknown is in what order the usual suspects will fill places 5 through 10?

On the evidence of the 2008 preseason, these fears, if not entirely unjustified, are at least a little inflated. For this winter's testing has thrown up some remarkable results, some interesting news, and a host of fresh faces to spice up the year's racing. The 2008 MotoGP season is a very long way from being a foregone conclusion.

The Rookies

The most obvious source of hope for 2008 is the influx of fresh young - and not quite so young - blood into the MotoGP class. If the 2007 grid consisted of mostly mature riders, that trend has been reversed this year. Out go the Thirtysomething crowd of Alex Barros, Carlos Checa, and Kenny Roberts Jr, to be replaced by a group of young men barely out of their teens. Experience has been replaced by impetuosity, and that is sure to be good for the show.

The Entertainer

And the show is definitely safe in the hands of one particular newcomer: Jorge Lorenzo is the most ostentatious entry into the MotoGP paddock since Valentino Rossi, the man he is destined to share a garage with. The two-time 250 world champion made a name for himself with his flamboyant post-victory race celebrations, similar in style to Rossi's grandstanding, but with a little less humor and a little more bombast. Those celebrations have made him both loved and hated, endearing him to his fans, while infuriating those already annoyed at Lorenzo's arrogance.

Perhaps the reason that Lorenzo's celebrations upset so many people is their frequency: the Spaniard won 8 races in 2006, and 9 in 2007, a strike rate of 50% or better over the past two seasons. Those two years were the culmination of his upbringing. His father, a prominent Spanish journalist, had written a book on how to raise a world champion, and used his son Jorge to prove his point. As a consequence, Lorenzo is doing exactly what he's been brought up to do: to race motorcycles, and to win.

Critics of Lorenzo say that his championships are not all they seem. They claim that much of the Mallorcan's domination was down to the relative paucity of the competition. Both Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa had left the 250 class in 2006, but Andrea Dovizioso ran Lorenzo close despite Lorenzo being on a much faster Aprilia. And, they say, Lorenzo's 2007 result was even more inflated, as Honda had just about ceased development on the 250 bike by this time, leaving Dovizioso fighting with one arm tied behind his back.

Despite the criticism, the fact remains that Jorge Lorenzo is a double 250 world champion. And the mark of his talent is that Yamaha were willing to risk the wrath of Rossi just to sign the Spaniard. Yamaha are all too aware that Rossi cannot race forever, and they need a high profile, talented replacement. Such was their eagerness to sign Lorenzo that they even promised him equal treatment and equal material with Rossi, a promise since breached in both letter and spirit by Rossi's switch to Bridgestone tires, and the installation of a divider wall between the two garages, turning the Fiat Yamaha team into two separate entities.

So Lorenzo has a lot to live up to, not just from his surroundings, but from himself. In preseason interviews, he has denied there is any pressure on him to perform this year, but given the rookies entering the class with him, Lorenzo must at least beat his former 250 rivals. So far in testing, Lorenzo has been surprisingly quick, even setting the fastest time at the final test in Qatar. Lorenzo may not win a championship this season, but so far, Yamaha's gamble looks like paying off.

Making Haste Slowly

The one man who Jorge Lorenzo cannot afford to finish behind is his archrival Andrea Dovizioso. The  Italian suffered through a very long and hard year on a severely underpowered Honda 250 last season, in the expectation that HRC would reward his loyalty with a MotoGP ride in 2008. And HRC kept their word, providing Dovizioso with a satellite Honda RC212V for the 2008 season.

Unfortunately for Dovizioso, the satellite Honda he was allocated was in the JiR team, formerly Konica Minolta Honda. That team, run by Luca Montiron, has had a shockingly poor record in MotoGP, turning the once-promising MotoGP race winner Makoto Tamada into an also ran, now demoted to riding in World Superbikes, and then going on to take much of the shine off of Shinya Nakano's career, who went from promising lead rider at Kawasaki, to permanent backmarker with Konica Minolta.

But Dovi may yet avoid the same fate as his Japanese predecessors. After losing the Konica Minolta sponsorship, most of Dovizioso's the Kopron Team Scot group which ran his 250 effort moved up to MotoGP with him, leaving Montiron as the figurehead of the team, manager in name only, while the remnants of his extremely successful 250 team get on with the actual work of running the race effort on a day-to-day basis.

Like Lorenzo, Dovizioso has been very rapid in preseason testing. But his speed is perhaps not such a surprise after all. Dovi spent two long years racing at the front on woefully underpowered machinery. Now, on more equal equipment, Dovizioso is poised to put the lessons he learned about braking later and carrying more corner speed than his rivals into effect. Dovizioso could be a very serious threat in 2008.

Number Two

While Lorenzo and Dovizioso were obvious candidate to be promoted to the MotoGP class, the announcement of the third rider to leave 250s raised a number of eyebrows. At the start of every season he's raced, the name Alex de Angelis has been bandied about as a potential candidate for a title, but every year, he's fallen short. Not usually by very much, but still de Angelis has never seemed able to make the necessary step from Nearly Man to winner. Indeed, despite a respectable 22 visits to the podium, only one of those trips was to stand on the top step. A solitary victory in the 250 class seems a rather fragile basis for a seat in MotoGP.

But despite his lack of results, de Angelis is yet another rookie to have impressed insiders during preseason testing. Stepping in to replace Toni Elias at Gresini Honda, de Angelis has been a top ten regular at the tests, often finishing ahead of the other rookies as well. So far, the satellite Hondas have been extremely strong in testing, the bike being based on Pedrosa's race winning bike at the final 2007 Valencia MotoGP round, while the factory Repsol Hondas have struggled a little, as HRC has dithered about whether to use the engine with pneumatic valve, or the steel spring valves. On a stable, proven platform, de Angelis could yet raise a few eyebrows in 2008, and pull a few surprising results out of the bag.

Odd Man Out

Of the four rookies to enter MotoGP in 2008, there is one who just does not fit the mold. He is not Spanish or Italian, he did not serve his apprenticeship in 125s and 250s, and at 27, he is generally thought to be way too old to be entering the premier class of motorcycle racing. He even left the secure place he had in the Honda hierarchy, a guarantee of winning in most classes, and made a leap of faith to join Yamaha. Conventional wisdom says that with all these things stacked against him, James Toseland's switch to MotoGP is doomed to disappointment, and will likely be as brief and inauspicious as those of the many British riders who have gone before him.

Toseland's first few outings aboard a MotoGP bike seemed to confirm those suspicions: At his first test on the bike at Sepang, the double World Superbike champion had a firm grip on the bottom of the timesheets. Two weeks later, JT improved some, starting outside the top ten, but finishing the test 8th fastest. Since then, Toseland has found more speed at each new test, to the point where he led the final test under the lights at Qatar for much of the session, only pipped at the post by a final fast lap put in by Jorge Lorenzo.

With improving results comes increased expectations. Despite the popularity of motorcycle racing in Britain, the country has not had a world champion since Barry Sheene in 1977. Now, for the first time in probably a generation, a British rider looks like having the magic combination of talent and equipment that could put him in with a chance of bringing the trophy back home to the UK. The pressure of expectation on James Toseland is enormous, but so far, Toseland has stood up admirably to that pressure.

The danger for Toseland is perhaps too much early success. On his present form, and with a bit of luck, Toseland could easily pinch a top 5 finish at some of the tracks which suit him. But if the British public gets used to seeing JT in the top 5 too early, then they may not have the patience to sit out the long slog that it takes to learn the bikes, the new tracks, and the series, which every rider entering MotoGP from Superbikes must face. There is reason for hope for Toseland, for despite the current thinking that the only route into MotoGP is through the smaller support classes, the last rider to enter from World Superbikes won a race last season, and finished 6th for the year. Chris Vermeulen has certainly made his mark on the series, and Ronald ten Kate, who managed both Toseland and Vermeulen in World Superbikes, believes Toseland is the better rider to work with.

Realistically, Toseland must be aiming for a place in the top ten at the end of the year, the question is, will the British press be willing to accept that, or will they turn on JT as quickly as they turn on their national soccer coaches?

The Contenders

The rookies may be a welcome injection of fresh blood into the series, but frankly, there's not much wrong with the blood already pumping around the arteries of MotoGP. In previous years, previews for the MotoGP series consisted of a great deal of scratching around looking for some interest to insert into the title race, as the winner was thought to already be a foregone conclusion, with only the podium places left to share out. More recently, though the previews came to much the same conclusions, the racing threw up a picture which completely confounded the pundits' predictions.

This year, however, for the first time in many years we have the prospect of a genuinely unpredictable three-way fight for the title, with any of the main candidates capable of carrying off the crown. And what a cast they provide: the former king, the heir apparent, and the usurper.

The Return Of The King

In any other year, there would be only one clear favorite for the MotoGP title, and that man would be Valentino Rossi. The Doctor ruled the series almost from the moment he stepped up from 250s back in 2000, taking second in his first year, and dominating from 2001 on. Rossi was the MotoGP Midas, and luck was seemingly always on his side: when he fell, the bike would keep on running, and he could remount; if he chose the wrong tire, his rivals would choose an even worse one; if he crashed out terminally, so would the men he was vying for the title with.

Then, in 2006, everything started to go wrong. For the first time since entering the class, Rossi got to ride a bike bearing a color scheme predominantly painted his lucky yellow, and ironically, Rossi suffered his worst run of luck ever, with tires disintegrating and bikes breaking down seemingly every week. In a thrilling race at the end of the season, Rossi's luck turned against him one more time, crashing out while chasing Nicky Hayden, and handing the American the world championship on a plate.

Putting down much of his bad luck to a lapse in concentration, after a brief flirt with Formula 1 came to an abrupt end, Rossi signed early with the factory Yamaha squad for 2007, and focused on winning back the title he regarded as his by right. But in 2007, Rossi's luck was no closer to returning, as the 7-time world champion hit the combination of Yamaha misjudging what was needed to win the new 800 cc formula, Michelin failing to cope with the new tire quota system, and Casey Stoner gelling with the Bridgestones and the Ducati to put in a perfect season reminiscent of Rossi in his better days.

For 2008, Rossi has tried to force the hand of Lady Luck once again. His first move was to engineer a switch to Bridgestone tires, handily also denying his rival Dani Pedrosa, and significantly, his team mate Jorge Lorenzo access to the Japanese rubber. The next maneuver was to utter veiled threats of leaving MotoGP early, or at least leaving Yamaha, if the bike didn't improve. And to ensure that Yamaha would focus on getting the M1 right, Rossi secured a guarantee from the Japanese factory that Masao Furusawa, general manager of Engineering Operations, would be directly and actively involved in the MotoGP project.

So far, Rossi's machinations seem to be paying off: the Yamaha is faster, especially on race tires, and The Doctor is improving with every test that passes, as he learns his way around the Bridgestone rubber. In an emphatic statement of  his intent for 2008, Rossi cut off his soft, curly locks, and appeared at the launch of the 2008 Yamaha M1 sporting a severe, military crew cut. Be in no doubt about it, Valentino Rossi is taking his title assault in 2008 very, very seriously.

The Anointed One

The first hurdle in Rossi's way is the man who HRC drafted as heir to his empire. Like Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa has been groomed for success since before his entry into the GP circus. Pedrosa's talent was spotted and nurtured by Alberto Puig, the man who has mentored many of the most promising riders now rising up through the MotoGP ranks. After taking one 125 and two 250 world titles, Pedrosa's entry into the Repsol Honda team was regarded as the first step on the way to deposing Rossi from his throne atop MotoGP, and returning the crown to what HRC regarded as its rightful home.

The first step in the Pedrosa plan was derailed somewhat after Nicky Hayden took the world championship at the end of Pedrosa's first and highly promising season in MotoGP. This now meant that Honda's original plan to focus development entirely around Dani Pedrosa, whilst ignoring any requests to make the bike more usable for Hayden, might look a little churlish. The Pedrosa plan then went even further astray, when HRC got their calculation of what it would take to win in the new 800cc MotoGP era so horribly wrong with the first iteration of the RC212V. By mid-season, Pedrosa's chances were gone.

Both Dani Pedrosa and Honda are determined not to make the same mistakes in 2008. As the 2007 season neared its climax, Pedrosa was ratcheting up the pressure on HRC by holding out on signing a new contract. There were rumors of various hard guarantees being demanded, in exchange for signing for longer than just a single year. And by the final race of 2007, Honda had just about caught up with Ducati, Pedrosa passing Casey Stoner on Valencia's long front straight on outright horsepower. By November 2007, Honda and Pedrosa seemed to be in perfect shape to claim the title they feel they deserve.

But then, at the first test of 2008, Dani Pedrosa crashed heavily, breaking a bone in his hand. Pedrosa was forced to miss the remainder of the preseason testing, only returning to testing proper at the final night tests at Qatar, shortly before the season started. This left Pedrosa complaining that the development work on the RC212V was being left to his team mate Nicky Hayden, something that tends to work against Pedrosa, as the two have such totally different riding styles. And complicating matters further are the continued problems with the pneumatic valve engine which Honda is developing in the pursuit of the horsepower to beat Ducati. On the track, the engine is no faster than the conventional spring valve unit, while it is rumored that the more powerful engines being tested in Japan keep destroying themselves on the dyno.

So the 2008 season has not gotten off to the start that Dani Pedrosa had hoped for, or planned. But despite these setbacks, Pedrosa is blisteringly fast, and capable of winning. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Pedrosa's 2007 season was the huge steps he made in improving on his weaknesses. Where once, Pedrosa was relatively simple to pass on the brakes, by the end of last year, it was Pedrosa diving up the inside of people into turns. And Pedrosa's aversion to rain and wet weather was put almost definitively to rest by his strong showing at Le Mans. Pedrosa was already good enough to steal 2nd place from Valentino Rossi in 2007. If Pedrosa keeps improving at the same pace in 2008, the highest step on the podium will be well within his reach.

Mr Right

But to get there, he'll first have to shove aside the man currently holding the crown. Casey Stoner owned 2007, completely annihilating the opposition and wrapping up the title with three rounds to go, and by the equivalent of five race wins. And yet at the start of the season, he had barely been regarded as a threat. He had spent 2006 on a customer Honda, often surprising with his speed, but just as often, disappointing by crashing out during the race, and was only signed by Ducati after they'd been turned down by both Marco Melandri and Nicky Hayden. For 2007, Stoner was expected to podium occasionally, but mostly to drive up Ducati's bill for carbon fiber bodywork.

How wrong they, or should I say we, all were. In 2006, all of Casey Stoner's crashes had come from losing the front wheel, usually early in the race. The switch to Bridgestone tires, which give better feedback and more warning than the second string Michelins Stoner was running on, meant the Australian could have complete confidence in his front end, and push as hard as wanted without suddenly launching into the scenery. Allied to this was Filippo Preziosi's astute guess that what was needed to win in the new 800 cc era was as much horsepower as possible, held in check by a decent electronics package, which also made sure that the engine used as much of the 21 liters of fuel as possible. During the early races in the season, Stoner easily made up the little ground he lost in the corners by ripping open the throttle down the straights.

Throughout the season, Stoner grew increasingly irritated, as MotoGP followers looked for a reason for his success. The Ducati was so much better than the rest, they said, ignoring the fact that the other factory Ducati, ridden by Loris Capirossi, was floundering in mid-pack. Bridgestone had an unfair advantage, the press and fans cried, conveniently overlooking the fact that second and third places in the championship were firmly in the hands of Michelin riders. And throughout the season, Ducati team boss Livio Suppo kept telling journalists "It's Casey."

So why is Casey Stoner so much faster than everyone else? It all seems to come down to confidence. Stoner is a very confident young man, as anyone who's ever seen him interviewed will agree. But that confidence needs to be rewarded and reciprocated for Stoner to shine, and that's exactly what happened in 2007. He came to a new team, who treated him like family, and he now trusts them implicitly, knowing that his feedback will be listened to, but perhaps more importantly, that they'll listen to him. He got married to his childhood sweetheart, removing another complication from the equation. He found tires he understood and could trust, so that he could stand the bike on his nose on the brakes, then pitch it into a turn, knowing that he would come out the other side without any nasty surprises. He knows and understands both the power of the bike and the electronics package, so that he is capable of dialing in exactly the right amount of throttle exiting a turn, and then holding the throttle there while the traction control smoothes out the bumps, and not backing off and confusing the electronics, as every instinct in his body is crying out to do.

These factors all came together in 2007 for Casey Stoner, to deliver him an almost perfect season. And so far throughout testing, Mr Perfect has been even better than last year, if anything. At the official IRTA qualifying session in Jerez, Stoner laid out the yardstick, the benchmark the others must measure themselves against, by winning the BMW Z4 on offer in just six laps. Of those six, five were faster than anyone else on track. Casey Stoner really is the man to beat in 2008.

It's Not The Bike

Anyone left doubting that Stoner is the major part of the equation need only take a look at where the other Ducatis are. Throughout the preseason testing, the phrase most often used to describe the Ducatis was "bookending the timesheets." For while Casey Stoner was consistently the fastest man on the track, the Alice Ducati team of Toni Elias and Sylvain Guintoli were invariably the slowest, with Stoner's team mate Marco Melandri faring not much better.

Lost

This is bad news for Melandri. After a brilliant year in 2005, and a year which could have been almost as good in 2006, if it hadn't been for a big crash at Barcelona, Melandri struggled during 2007. The Italian's problems were mainly down to the fact that he was on a satellite Honda RC212V. Once HRC realized that they had got the bike so wrong, all of their development efforts went into fixing the factory bikes, with new parts filtering down to the satellite bikes only very slowly. Melandri, who had been given guarantees about the level of factory support he would enjoy, and feeling betrayed by Honda's failure to make good on those guarantees, jumped ship early, exercising an option to sign for Ducati after he met their stipulation that he be in the top 6 of the championship standings after Laguna Seca.

Melandri's move generated a huge wave of excitement. Reunited with Livio Suppo, the team manager who had been close to Melandri almost since Macio had entered the paddock as a youngster, great things were expected of the partnership of Melandri in an Italian team on an Italian bike.

But then, testing began, and Melandri's results worryingly resembled those of Loris Capirossi last year. So far, Melandri has completely failed to make an impact, not getting on with the bike at all, and searching for any kind of setup that will work. The results post in testing say that he is yet to find one. Melandri looks like being in for another long year of suffering with a machine that won't do what he wants. But unlike last year, he won't be able to blame the factory, for only a radical change to the laws of physics will keep his team mate, on exactly the same bike, from being at the front of the pack.

And it's not just Melandri who will suffer. Both Toni Elias and Sylvain Guintoli look set to follow the same path. Both were recruited by Luis d'Antin at the end of last season, as part of Ducati's strategy to build the Pramac d'Antin team into a factory junior team. So it was out with the veterans of Alex Barros and Alex Hofmann, and in with the young talent, as a possible step up into a future factory ride.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Toni Elias seemed the most likely candidate for a step up to the big time. Elias is a huge favorite with the fans for his out-of-control riding style, although less so with some of the other riders, who have complained bitterly about his aggressive, physical passing. After his first win at the thriller in Estoril 2006, Elias looked capable of making another step forward in his progress as a rider, but his development stalled a little during 2007, despite scoring a couple of podiums. In 2008, he needs to make progress once again, but his test outings on the Ducati have not given much room for hope.

His team mate, and rookie of the year 2007, made quite an impact on the series. Signed to ride for the Dunlop-shod Tech 3 Yamaha team, Sylvain Guintoli was almost universally ignored on his entry into the MotoGP class, but that didn't last for long. By Le Mans, where Guintoli battled at the front of the field, and even led the race for a while, it was obvious that the world had seriously underestimated the young Frenchman. Guintoli, like Ant West, was a fast privateer from the 250 class, but there were few clues as to how Guintoli would work out on more competitive machinery. By the end of the year, the Frenchman had come tantalizingly close to a podium in Japan, and impressed everyone with his speed, and the way he helped the development of the Dunlops.

Now, though, Guintoli seems to be in the same boat as Elias and Melandri, bringing up the tail end of the test times. Things may change once the flag drops, and racing starts in earnest, but so far, it looks like being Australian is a prerequisite for making the Ducati go fast. This is not just a problem for Elias, Guintoli and Melandri; it's also a pointer to serious problems for Ducati. If there's only one rider who can make their bike fly, then what will Ducati do if Stoner is injured, or gets an offer he can't refuse from Honda or Yamaha? The design philosophy for Ducati Corse has so far been to make the bike as fast as possible in a straight line, and let the rider sort out the corners. But with Casey Stoner the only rider able to put that strategy into effect, Ducati needs to either find answers for everyone else, or another rider who can do what Stoner can just as well.

Green vs Blue

Ducati's plight is illustrated by the man who gave them their first win in MotoGP, and had been a cornerstone of the program since the beginning. Loris Capirossi went from title candidate in 2006 to 7th place straggler in 2007 in a one fell swoop. The only real difference in that year was the new bike, which Capirex just could not get on with. By mid-season, it was clear that Capirossi's role at Ducati was played out, and after the summer, the Italian veteran announced he would be moving to Suzuki.

The moved was greeted with much interest, as once a rider has spent a long time with a single marque, the questions start to come: is his success down to the bike, or the rider? Can he adapt to a bike which is completely different to anything he's ridden before? That speculation was piqued further by the big step forward which Suzuki had made during 2007. The team had gone from mid-pack at best in 2005 to race winner and podium regular in 2007. A veteran like Capirossi could be the final piece in the puzzle, making the difference between being close to Honda, Ducati and Yamaha, and competing with them on an equal footing.

But while the Suzukis surprised with their speed during the 2007 preseason, this winter, they've been far less of a threat. The powder blue brigade seem to have slumped from around 5th fastest down to 10th fastest, with no obvious explanation. That the problem is with the bike is obvious, as at almost every track the Suzukis have visited, Capirossi and Vermeulen have set very similar times. But so far, neither man has looked capable of shooting for the title.

A Trouble Shared

The aim, for both Vermeulen and for Capirossi, will be race wins. Chris Vermeulen scored his maiden win in MotoGP last year, in difficult, changeable conditions at Le Mans, consolidating his reputation as possibly the best wet weather rider in the paddock. But an impressive podium at Laguna Seca, and another at Misano, both in warm sunny weather, are pointers to Vermeulen's further potential. On his day, Vermeulen is a tough customer to beat, but he still has a couple of weakness he needs to overcome.

The first is qualifying. If you look at Chris Vermeulen's race times throughout the year, disregarding the first lap or so, Vermeulen is one of the fastest riders on the track. His problem is that all too often, he's having to start from the third and fourth row of the grid, after failing to put in a fast time during qualifying. Improvement here will put Vermeulen in with a chance on a weekly basis.

Vermeulen's other weakness is more worrying, especially as it is shared by his team mate. At Laguna Seca, Vermeulen is transformed from top 10 candidate to certain podium. Similarly, when the MotoGP circus pitches its tent at Motegi, you can safely pencil in the name of Loris Capirossi as the winner. But take Vermeulen to Mugello or Capirex to Le Mans, and the roles are reversed: suddenly they are invisible. To contend for a championship, you need to be close to the front every weekend, whether you like the racetrack or not. Neither man is there just yet.

Going Green

Capirossi's departure from Ducati mirrored that of the man he replaced. Like Capirex, John Hopkins had spent almost his entire time in MotoGP with one team, Suzuki, and questions were starting to be asked of how good Hopper would be on more competitive machinery. The first hints that Hopkins was about to move came early in the season, when the American announced that he was parting ways with his previous personal sponsor, Red Bull, and joining forces with another energy drinks manufacturer, Monster Energy. With Monster already heavily involved with Kawasaki in all forms of racing in the US, it was painfully obvious that Hopkins was about to move to join Team Green, and bring his sponsor with him. When the deal was officially announced, it barely made a ripple in the news.

But Hopkins' move was intriguing: Kawasaki, although rapidly improving throughout 2007, were hardly the leap forward which Hopkins needed if he wanted to start winning. Moving to Kawasaki would mean more development work, more testing, and more working out the bugs in the hope of striking it lucky. With Suzuki apparently a few steps ahead of Kawasaki in this area, why would Hopper risk it? The answer is twofold: one is undoubtedly money, with Hopkins reputedly being paid 4 million Euros for 2008, but the other is less prosaic.

After waiting for Suzuki to come good for so long, Hopkins may have just run out of patience, and decided to take a chance. And when you examined the Kawasaki's performance last year, the leap of faith may not have been as large as it appears at first glance. Throughout 2007, the Kawasakis were getting better almost every race, and by the end of the year, there was nothing wrong with the straight line speed, even putting the Ducati to shame on occasion. All the Kawasakis needed was someone who could help them get the bike to go around corners properly, and the riders they started the season with just didn't seem up to the task. As the preseason tests have progressed, so has the Kawasaki, Hopper providing valuable input on making corner entry smoother and easier. Only a groin injury, caused by a crash at Phillip Island, put a halt to the progress Hopkins has made so far. Kawasaki and Hopkins could very well turn out to be the surprise package of 2008. The Monster Millions could be a very wise investment indeed.

Last Chance Saloon

It wasn't just John Hopkins that Kawasaki took a gamble with. But Ant West, their other rider, is a gamble for entirely different reasons. West has always shown promise, and was usually the fastest privateer in the 250 class, but he never seemed to get a chance on a factory team to show what he was actually capable of. The Australian started 2007 on a privateer 250, quitting the team prematurely citing a complete lack of faith in the setup of the team. His luck then turned, as an injury to Kevin Curtain meant that West was drafted in as a replacement on the factory Yamaha World Supersport bike. He made a devastating impression, getting two wins and a third in just three races which he rode for Yamaha. After being offered the factory Supersport ride for the rest of the season, West's luck got even better, when he was drafted in to replace the injured Olivier Jacque, who finally gave up on racing after one crash too many.

Since then, West has been mercurial, to put it kindly. Brilliant on occasion, especially in the wet, but often mediocre, and sometimes just downright disappointing, West was given an ultimatum by Kawasaki at the end of 2007: Improve your fitness for 2008, or get ready to pack your bags. West has already worked hard to improve his situation, but so far, this has yet to show in testing.

Ant West presents teams with one of the biggest quandaries in racing. If it rains, West is almost certain to get on the podium, and would have to be a strong bet to take a wet weather win before the season is out. And yet that win is unlikely to translate into a strong result in the championship standings, as West struggles at tracks where he isn't comfortable. Racing insiders in Australia often tip West as the most talented rider to come out of the country, but as probably the weakest racer. An excess of natural ability has allowed West to get away with doing the minimum in terms of training and race craft. But now, West has hit the big time, and talent alone will only get you so far. If Ant West wants to stay in MotoGP, he is going to have to really work for it. 2008 will either be the start of a long career, or West's final year in MotoGP.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

One man who can be certain this is his last year in MotoGP is Colin Edwards. The Texan, demoted from the Fiat Yamaha team to Tech 3 Yamaha to make way for Jorge Lorenzo, has made it fairly clear that he expects to leave MotoGP at the end of the season. Having just turned 34, and with two children approaching school age, Edwards is starting to think about returning home to the US, and is rumored to have been offered an attractive package to ride a Yamaha R1 in AMA Superbikes. He may not exactly be in the twilight of his career, but the light is definitely taking on a warmer, more orange tinge.

That does not mean he'll be taking it easy. Edwards still has a score to settle: the double World Superbike champion is yet to win a race in MotoGP, a fact made even more frustrating by crashing out in the final corner at Assen in 2006, thereby handing Nicky Hayden the win on a plate. And his departure from the factory Yamaha team is not the handicap it may at first seem, as Edwards' role as team mate to Valentino Rossi meant he spent much of his time helping out with The Doctor's title fights, by either testing new tires, or new parts, or holding Rossi's opponents up.  Now, Edwards is free to ride as he pleases, and has the added benefit of being an important link in Michelin's tire testing and development chain. If Michelin have a new tire they think might work, there's a very good chance Colin Edwards will be the first rider to get a shot at racing on it.

While last year, having Michelin tires was usually a distinct disadvantage, that's unlikely to be the case in 2008. The French tire maker lost the championship for the first time since 1991, and that is not a situation they intend to accept. Michelin has spent the off-season working on tires which will work in a much greater range of temperatures, much like the Bridgestones do, and early test results look promising. One thing is certain: Michelin have no intention of getting as viciously mugged by Bridgestone as they were in 2007.

The Price Of Loyalty

A Michelin revival is exactly what Nicky Hayden needs. After taking the title with a year of sheer hard work, consistent podiums, and occasional brilliance, Hayden had to suffer the humiliation of attempting to defend his #1 plate on a motorcycle designed specifically for his team mate, a bike which was too small, offered too little wind protection, and was also underpowered and poorly balanced. His defense was star-crossed from the start.

But Hayden earned the respect of many of the people who had decried his 2006 championship as he labored on through 2007. The Kentucky Kid kept working, kept trying, never complained, and barely spoke an ill word against Honda and the inadequate machine they had provided him to ride, whilst his fellow RC212V jockeys were pouring vitriol on HRC's efforts. As always, Hayden was invariably the rider who put in the most laps at post-race testing session, hoping to find some kind of improvement. Shortly after Catalunya, they found something, as Hayden and Pete Benson, his crew chief, finally persuaded HRC to allow them to turn the traction control down, so Hayden could ride with something approaching his natural style. A spate of podiums was his reward, before slipping back into mid-pack again by the end of the season.

So far, Hayden has gotten along a great deal better with the 2008 Honda than with the 2007 bike. The new version of the RC212V is physically bigger, so it suits average sized riders better, and it delivers more power than the old bike, and both factors have helped Hayden put in significantly better results in testing than a year ago.  To Hayden's great relief, 2008 does not look like being a repeat of 2007. For the one thing that Nicky Hayden cannot afford is another disaster like last year. On the final year of his contract with Repsol Honda, Hayden need be under no illusion that he will need an exceptional season if he is to remain where he is. His team mate - although Repsol Honda has not been a real team for a very long time - has made it eminently clear that he would prefer to share the garage with someone other than the American. And with some justification, as Pedrosa's and Hayden's riding styles are so radically different that it is almost impossible to develop a bike that suits them both equally.

The bad news for Hayden is that a horde of young 250 riders have just entered MotoGP gunning for his seat, nearly all of whom would be a better match with Pedrosa's style. So unless Nicky Hayden has another year like 2006, he could find his admirable loyalty to Honda being studiously ignored at the end of the year, and be forced to look around at other options. In previous years, Yamaha and Ducati have shown interest in The Kentucky Kid, but with those seats sewn up for the foreseeable future, Hayden may not have the luxury of much choice. This year really will determine the former champion's future.

The Forgotten

Another man fighting for his future is Shinya Nakano. Once Kawasaki's golden boy, and tipped by many to be a future star, Nakano had a nightmare year on the Konica Minolta Honda. Unable to get on with the Michelin tires, and not helped by being on the weakest team in the paddock, Nakano spent all year struggling just to get into the points, where a year earlier, he looked capable of battling for a podium most weekends. It looked increasingly like we had seen the last of Super Shinya as the 2007 season neared its end.

But Nakano had luck, and a spot of favoritism on his side. With the disappointing Makoto Tamada obviously headed out of MotoGP, Dorna and the Japanese factories faced the prospect of a season without a single Japanese rider. And so Nakano was give one last chance, partnering Alex de Angelis on a Gresini Honda. A move which is fortuitous in another way as well, as Nakano will be back on Bridgestone tires, and has once again found the confidence in the front end of his machine that he was missing. In preseason testing so far, Nakano has been overshadowed by the attention paid to his young team mate, but Nakano has matched de Angelis' times very closely at most sessions. Shinya Nakano may be fighting for his future in MotoGP this season, but with everyone looking no further than his disastrous 2007 season, the Japanese star could well turn up a few surprises this year.

The Surprise Package

If Nakano might be expected to surprise a few people, Frenchman Randy de Puniet could prove to be positively startling. De Puniet had an offer to extend his contract from Kawasaki last year, and to the surprise of most people in the paddock, he turned it down. Instead, he signed with LCR Honda, reunited once again with Lucio Cecchinello, who'd been his team manager when the Frenchman had ridden in 250s.

Given the fortunes of the other Bridgestone riders who switched to Michelins, including his former team mate Nakano, the decision seems almost incomprehensible. De Puniet is already one of MotoGP's most prolific crashers, and to move to the team where Casey Stoner earned his reputation for hitting the gravel seems almost an act of insanity. However, a little closer examination throws up some interesting parallels with the Australian.

Casey Stoner's reputation as a crasher was earned through a series of crashes where he lost the front due to a sudden loss of grip. His fortunes improved drastically after the move to Bridgestones, as the Japanese front tire is justly famed for its predictability and its feedback. Randy de Puniet, on the other hand, tends to crash out either through acts of irrational exuberance, or through losing the rear. Although tires can do little to help with de Puniet's overly optimistic approach to passing, the Michelins are generally considered to have superior rear tires, and this could reduce de Puniet's propensity to crash.

If de Puniet can manage to keep it on two wheels, he could well turn a few heads this year. The Frenchman has surprised a lot of people during testing by consistently finishing very close to the front. If he can hold on to that pace, and cut down on his crashes, Randy de Puniet could turn out to be the revelation of 2008.

In The Beginning

And so, the clock is ticking down towards the moment MotoGP fans have been waiting for over the long, dark winter: the moment the lights go out, and the air is filled with the screech of 220 horsepower engines tearing off the line and into the first turn; the moment when racing has well and truly resumed again. The season is close, and looking at the names lining up on the grid, the racing should be closer. This year, MotoGP can justly claim to be the premier class of motorcycle racing, as the 18 riders who will line up on the grid at Qatar include 11 world champions, with 24 world titles between them, from 125s, 250s, World Supersport, World Superbikes, and MotoGP.

What is even better for the fans is that the thorough humiliation handed out by Casey Stoner, Ducati and Bridgestone has spurred the others into action, and the bikes, the tires and the riders are all much closer than they were a year ago. Honda has spent every waking hour building a new RC212V, capable of matching the Ducati in top speed and agility, while Valentino Rossi has brought extraordinary pressure to bear on Yamaha, to up their game and provide him with a bike which will be competitive. Kawasaki has finally roped in a big name rider, and Suzuki has a veteran and a maturing rider to push their effort forward. The class has been filled with young, and not so young, rookies, all eager and hungry for glory. And to help with the tire situation, the quota has been extended, from 14 fronts and 17 rears last year to 18 fronts and 22 rears for this season. Although Casey Stoner remains very much the man to beat, the Australian world champion will face a great deal more resistance in 2008 than he did last year. The prospects for MotoGP look excellent.

The Missing Link

There is only one small cloud on the horizon, in the shape of a hole on the grid. For the first time since 1978, there will not be a Roberts in the MotoGP paddock. King Kenny has spent the last few months working on a major sponsorship deal with a big American casino chain, involving various disciplines of motorsport, and providing the kind of money that could make Team KR competitive. It's a deal Team KR have been working on for a long time, and rumors of an imminent breakthrough have been rife almost from the start. So far, though, no announcement has come. If Roberts cannot sort out a deal, the paddock will be a very different place, and his absence points to MotoGP's weakness. With only 18 riders on the grid, and the costs of competing rise year on year, the grid is starting to look pretty thin. MotoGP needs an injection of cash to keep it running, and that money will only come from an increase in exposure, and in public interest.

The best way to generate public interest is to ensure close, exciting racing. And from all we've seen so far, the omens are good. There are a lot of people with an awful lot at stake, and the racing could be bloody, brutal and very thrilling indeed. I can hardly wait.

Bittersweet. That, in a word, describes the final MotoGP round at Valencia. Riders, teams, fans and followers, all face the weekend of MotoGP's last race with very mixed feelings. The time and place, Valencia in early November, has a lot going for it. The weather is perfect for racing and spectating alike, not so hot that it melts both bikes and fans, but warm enough that the tires get up to temperature, and fans can sit in the sun all day. The track is fantastic for viewing: located in a natural bowl, you can see most of the track from almost anywhere around the banked seating areas. The atmosphere is electric, as over 130,000 motorcycle racing fans from every country you've ever heard of, plus a few you haven't, pour into the town of Cheste and the Ricardo Tormo circuit. And as it's the last race of the season there is always some kind of spectacle, with so many riders leaving their current teams, and sometimes the series, dead set on going out in style.

But because it is the last race of the season, there is normally little excitement left in the championship. By now, the title is usually already sewn up, as it was this year, and getting excited about the race for 4th place in the championship takes more commitment than most fans have left at the end of a long season. And though the tightness of the track means that it is hard for riders to break away, if they do get a gap, it's very hard for their pursuers to close it back down again. But perhaps worst of all, the Valencia round also means that fans and followers face four long, dark months without MotoGP, leaving them a miserable burden on their friends and families, and forced to entertain themselves.

The final round of the 2007 MotoGP season was met with even more ambiguous feelings than normal. On the one hand, most were glad that the season so utterly dominated by the brilliance of Casey Stoner and the Ducati team was nearly over, such a stark contrast with the exhilarating racing of least year. With Valencia done, maybe next year's new arrivals, such as Jorge Lorenzo and James Toseland, could bring back the close battles that MotoGP fans long to see.

Closer

On the other hand, the dominance which Casey Stoner had displayed for most of the season was starting to wane, as the young Australian champion's winning margins declined. It was obvious that the competition, most notably Honda and Michelin, were closing the gap almost every race. Valencia offered the tantalizing prospect of a straight up race, the room for excuses getting smaller.

The first day of practice did little to remove that ambiguity, as Casey Stoner was once again fastest out of the box. But though Stoner topped the timesheets in both sessions, the competition, in the shape of Dani Pedrosa and Marco Melandri, were hot on his heels. A Stoner whitewash still looked the most likely scenario, but there was also the intriguing possibility that if Pedrosa and Melandri could catch the Australian, the race could be a very close affair indeed.

If Friday brought confusion, Saturday brought consternation. Firstly, the morning session saw Sylvain Guintoli set the fastest time on his Dunlop-shod Tech 3 Yamaha, with Pedrosa, Melandri, and now Alex Barros closing right up on Stoner's times. Then, less than 10 minutes into the afternoon's official qualifying practice, Valentino Rossi, who had been struggling with grip all weekend, ran wide at Turn 1, got on the gas too early, and was flung up the road by his viciously shaking Yamaha M1, fracturing three bones in his right hand and hurting his back. With Dani Pedrosa taking pole position ahead of Casey Stoner, it looked like there could be a genuine race for the win, and for 2nd place in the championship.

Despite carrying an injury that would severely hamper most riders, on Sunday afternoon, Valentino Rossi sat on the grid, unwilling to miss a race for the first time in his long career. Though many might consider 2nd place to be merely first loser, The Doctor was not prepared to relinquish it without a fight. But both Rossi and Pedrosa would have to work for that position. Though he sat on pole, Pedrosa still had to win the race to close the 24 point gap to Rossi, while Rossi had to fight his way through the field from 17th on the grid into the points. Rossi had his injury to battle, while Pedrosa had Casey Stoner to beat, and little chance of any help from Melandri and Barros, the other riders with strong race pace, who were stuck down on the 4th row of the grid.

Last Call

So as the lights faded for the final time of the season, and the earth trembled to the sound of 18 bikes unleashing 4,000 horsepower upon the tarmac, all eyes were on the front of the grid, and the drag race down to Turn 1. As loudly as the Spanish crowd roared Pedrosa on, it was once again Casey Stoner who got his trademark rocket-propelled start, and peeled into the left hander already several bike lengths ahead. Nicky Hayden followed Stoner at a respectful distance, with Dani Pedrosa just inches behind Hayden. Out of Turn 1 and along the short straight, Pedrosa pulled alongside his Repsol Honda team mate, and forced his bike up the inside into Turn 2, and past into 2nd place.

With Pedrosa through, John Hopkins was the next man Hayden had to worry about, the powder blue Rizla Suzuki all over the back of Hayden's Honda. A small gap separated Hopkins and Stoner's Ducati team mate Loris Capirossi, while both Marco Melandri and Alex Barros were already up to 6th and 7th after just a couple of corners, assisted by the terrible starts the entire 2nd row had got, consisting of Kawasaki's Randy de Puniet and the Tech 3 Yamaha pairing of Sylvain Guintoli and Makoto Tamada.

Here We Go Again

By the time the pack rounded Turn 8, and headed back into the midfield complex, the race looked eerily familiar. Casey Stoner led, and had gapped the field already, Dani Pedrosa heading the chase. At previous MotoGP rounds, Stoner getting a half-second lead on the first lap had been a prelude to the Australian walking away with the race, and that pattern looked like repeating itself once again.

Dani Pedrosa had other ideas. Seeing Stoner depart, the pint-sized Spaniard got his head down and chased the Australian through the infield, down the everlasting left of Turn 13, and by the time they crossed the line to finish the first lap, Pedrosa had clawed back over a tenth, cutting Stoner's lead to 0.3 seconds, and was closing.

But Stoner was on his customary charge, and already hitting astonishing speeds. On the next lap, just the second of the race, Casey Stoner smashed the lap record set by team mate Loris Capirossi in last year's race by 0.15 of a second. But as fast as Stoner was, Pedrosa was not far behind, giving away less than a tenth on lap 2, and taking it back on lap 3. This time, the Australian champion-elect was not going to get it all his own way.

With the former 250 rivals setting a scorching pace at the front, Nicky Hayden, in his last race as reigning world champion, was doing all he could to defend the #1 plate with dignity. The Kentucky Kid had John Hopkins and Marco Melandri right behind him, Melandri having passed Capirossi on the first lap. But Hayden had a problem: his front row spot on the grid belied the terrible problems he had had with traction on race tires, his Honda being no trouble at all on soft and sticky qualifiers. In a desperate attempt at fixing the problem, Hayden and his crew chief had even resorted to using a wet weather setup, to at least get some kind of heat in the tires, and find some kind of grip. It helped some, but Hayden had his hands full trying to keep his sliding RC212V in third, with Hopkins and Melandri pushing all the while.

Wide Boy

For Hopkins and Melandri, it was imperative to get past as quickly as possible if they were to have a chance of catching the front two, but Hayden was putting up a stupendous fight. At the end of lap 2, Hayden was already one and three quarter seconds down on Stoner, and considerably slower. And though Hayden had too little grip through the corners, down the straight, he had more than enough power to hold off his assailants. Hopkins' Suzuki could only sit in the draft of Hayden's Honda down the front straight, while the extra horsepower of Melandri's Honda allowed him to pull out of Hopkins's slipstream at the end of the straight. It was not enough to get past, though, Hopkins holding Melandri off on the brakes, neither man close enough to get past Hayden.

Next time round, the pattern repeated itself. Hopkins sat in Hayden's draft, while Melandri crawled all over the Suzuki's tail. This time, however, Hopkins had a plan. Knowing he couldn't get past Hayden down the front straight, he sat patiently behind the Honda, and lined Hayden up into Turn 2 instead. Once past, Hopkins was immediately off to try and chase down the front runners.

This left Melandri with a problem. Throughout the practice sessions, the Italian, riding his last race on a Honda, had been as fast as Pedrosa and Stoner on race tires. But here he was, stuck behind Hayden and straining to get past. With Hopkins now out of the way, Melandri tried the same trick into Turn 1, pulling out of Hayden's draft to pass the American at the end of the front straight. Unfortunately for Melandri, Hayden had seen that coming, and cut in later, to slide back ahead of the Italian on the exit of the corner, and back into 4th. Melandri was right back where he started.

The More Things Change

While one Repsol Honda was being chased, another was giving chase at the front. Dani Pedrosa had parried Casey Stoner's new record on lap 2, and was gradually eating away at the Australian's lead. For two laps, the Spaniard took only a few hundredths back, but on lap 5, it was Pedrosa who smashed the lap record, and in doing so, launched his RC212V down the front straight, pulling out of the Ducati's draft to lead easily into Turn 1.

A wave of fans leaping to their feet charted Pedrosa's progress around the track. This is what the Spanish crowd had come to see, hoping rather against hope that Dani Pedrosa could finally find a way to convert his fourth pole in a row into a win. Now past Stoner, the chips were starting to fall in the Spaniard's favor. It was Pedrosa's turn to push, and Stoner's turn to try and follow.

Once over the shock of being passed, Stoner matched Pedrosa on lap 7, but his resistance was only cursory. As lap followed lap, it was Pedrosa who set fast, consistent lap times, extending his lead by a tenth of a second almost every lap. By the time the pair crossed the line at the halfway mark, Dani Pedrosa had built a cushion of 1.8 seconds. Comfortable, but not decisive, the question now was whether his Michelin tires could last the distance, or if he would give his lead away as his tires went off.

At the back of the field, Valentino Rossi could no longer afford to take that chance. Starting from 17th place, Rossi had taken the first 5 laps to work out how to ride around his broken hand, and getting held up by Ant West, the Australian having the worst weekend of his season on the Kawasaki. On lap 6, The Doctor was past, and his lap times started to drop. Two and a half seconds down on Carlos Checa, and the vital point he needed to secure 2nd place in the championship, he started to close in. On the next lap, lap 8, he got nearly half a second back, and by lap 12, Rossi was on Checa's tail, the Spaniard engaged in a four-way battle for 12th place with Makoto Tamada, Shinya Nakano and Colin Edwards.

As the battle raged around him, Rossi picked his way forward, clearly faster than those around him. On lap 14, he forced his way past Nakano, the Japanese rider having been passed previously by Checa, and 2 laps later, he was ahead of Tamada as well. Now in 14th, he had a comfortable margin and was still the fastest rider of the group, and 6th fastest man on the track. With Checa and Edwards within easy reach, a 12th place finish looked the very least Rossi could expect, holding onto his 2nd spot on the title race with points to spare.

Fate, A Fickle Mistress

Under normal circumstances, that's exactly what would have happened. But the 2006 and 2007 seasons have seen anything but normal circumstances. As Rossi entered the braking zone for Turn 1, after chasing Carlos Checa down the front straight, the rear of his Yamaha M1 twitched severely, forcing Rossi to run wide through the first corner. Any speculation that this was Rossi outbraking himself was swiftly quashed, as The Doctor started to coast. Where Rossi had been 6th fastest on lap 17, he was 10 seconds slower on lap 18, and 20 seconds the next lap. On lap 20, Rossi pulled into the pits, a partially seized engine having ended his race.

Two years ago, one of the many things Valentino Rossi was known for was his luck. Whenever he crashed, he could always remount, rejoin the race, and fight his way back up through the field. He only ever suffered engine failure once his chief rivals had already crashed out, and if crashes happened in front of him, the resulting carnage would always take out Max Biaggi, or Sete Gibernau, but never Valentino Rossi.

That was then. Somewhere around the height of Rossi's flirt with Formula 1 at the end of the 2005 season, Rossi's luck disappeared. Since that time, Rossi has suffered engine failures and freak tire failures. He has crashed, and been unable to continue. His Yamaha has developed mysterious bouts of chatter which failed to appear during testing. And he has had been stuck with the Michelin tires which have so signally failed to be competitive this year. Many of these factors have been beyond his control, and down to manufacturing and design failures at remote facilities which Rossi has been unable to sufficiently influence, and some of them are down to Rossi taking his eye off the ball during the development phase.

But some of those failures can only be down to The Doctor's legendary luck having turned. After the race, Rossi was both furious and frank. "If someone put some bad luck on us I would like to know who it is, because for sure he did well. I have to congratulate him..." he told Italian TV reporters, and went on to threaten Yamaha that this streak of failures must not continue into next year. If Valentino Rossi does not get more speed and more reliability for 2008, then he is almost certain to switch to another team for the season after. The Doctor does not like to lose.

Number Two

Rossi's loss was Pedrosa's gain. At the front of the field, the Spanish prodigy had only to hold on to his lead to clinch 2nd in the title race. His problem was that the man he had to defend against was Casey Stoner, the fastest man of the year. And the comfortable lead that he had built up by half distance was starting to slip. On three consecutive laps, Pedrosa saw Stoner take back fractions of a second, despite Pedrosa going faster on each of those laps. On lap 19, Pedrosa went faster still, and this time, it was Stoner who lost time, giving back some of the lead which he had fought so hard to cut back.

But it was not yet done. For the next 6 laps, the gap vacillated, Dani Pedrosa first building his lead, only to see Casey Stoner pare it back again. But try as Stoner might, Ducati's first world champion could never get close enough to make an attempt on first place, and with 4 laps to go, Stoner finally capitulated. Dani Pedrosa went on to win his second race of the season, to the delight of the Spanish crowd, and the relief of the Repsol Honda garage. He had won the Valencia race in the same way he had won at the Sachsenring, by getting ahead and pushing as hard and long as possible.

Casey Stoner came home in 2nd place, on the receiving end of a dose of his own medicine. Stoner had gotten a dream start, and looked strong for the first few laps, but once Pedrosa was past, there was nothing that Stoner could do. But with 10 wins out 18 races this season, and tying Valentino Rossi's points record, Stoner's 2nd place at Valencia was just a very minor blemish on the closest thing we have seen to a perfect season for a very, very long time.

Moving On

In his final race for Suzuki, John Hopkins capped his 5 long years with the team with another 3rd place, his 4th podium of the year, in the season when the Suzuki finally started coming good. Hopkins has long been a highly rated rider on a badly underpowered bike, and this year, he finally got a chance to show what he could do on decent equipment. His podium was a fitting parting gift to the team that has supported him for so long. It also meant that he settled the internal battle with team mate Chris Vermeulen for 4th place in the championship, and moved the Rizla Suzuki team up into 3rd place in the team standings. A suitable reward for both rider and team.

Marco Melandri came home in 4th place, the Gresini Honda rider eventually getting past Nicky Hayden in the last few laps. The two men had spent much of the race knocking three bells out of each other, but Melandri had finally gotten the upper hand once Hayden's tires went off.

Loris Capirossi beat Chris Vermeulen to 5th place, the Ducati veteran holding off the man who will be his team mate at Suzuki for next year over the last third of the race. Capirossi had hung off the back of the Melandri / Hayden battle, unable to catch the two Hondas, and with little threat from behind. At least until Vermeulen came charging through the field, once again turning a poor grid position into a decent finish.

Alex Barros eventually finished in 7th, after slipping back from an outstanding start with a tire problem. The Brazilian veteran - and if any rider deserves the term, it is Barros - finished what was probably the last race of his career with dignity, but without the reward he had hoped for. Before his tire started causing problems, he had been in the race for 4th, but under the circumstances, Barros can leave the series with his head held high.

Heavy Burden

Barros wasn't the only rider forced to nurse his tires home. After putting up a brilliant, and thoroughly entertaining fight with Marco Melandri for 4th for much of the race, Nicky Hayden was forced to settle for 8th place once his tires went off. It was not the result that Hayden had wanted, and the now ex-world champion is bitterly disappointed that he was unable to win a race with the #1 plate on his bike, something he felt the reputation of the title deserved. However, it was also something he could do little about, given the material he had to work with. Hayden will surely be glad that the longest season of his life is finally over, and he can finally look forward to improved equipment, both tires and bike, for 2008.

Randy de Puniet finished his last race on the Kawasaki in 9th place, after fighting with Alex Barros and Chris Vermeulen for much of the race. After his podium in Japan, de Puniet must have wanted to finish the season better than this, but he struggled almost from the start.

Behind de Puniet, Toni Elias came home in 10th, after finally beating his future team mate at Pramac d'Antin, Sylvain Guintoli. The two young guns had slugged it out for the second half of the race, Elias finally getting the upper hand once Guintoli's Dunlop tires, making their final appearance in the premier class, eventually ran out of grip. For Guintoli, 11th place, well ahead of his team mate, is an excellent finish for the French rookie of the year.

The Long Goodbye

Behind Guintoli, the four-way battle which had raged for much of the race was finally settled in Carlos Checa's favor. The Spanish veteran leaves MotoGP to join the Ten Kate team in World Superbikes, hoping to go from what he described as a terrible Honda to the bike that won the championship last year.

Colin Edwards came home in 13th place, finishing an equally torrid final season with Fiat Yamaha, a season which has seen him both on the podium and at the back of the field. Edwards must be praying that both Yamaha and Michelin get the act together for 2008, as he heads to the Tech 3 Yamaha satellite squad on French rubber.

Behind Edwards, Shinya Nakano took 14th place in his final ride for what is almost certainly the worst team in the paddock, and a veritable black hole of talent. Nakano leaves Japan Italy Racing, the team that fielded the Konica Minolta Honda, to ride a Bridgestone-shod Gresini Honda next year. He can only be delighted that he is back on Japanese rubber, and in a team with a proven record of winning races.

In 15th place, the other victim of JIR, Makoto Tamada, took the final point of his MotoGP career. Tamada's career has been in decline ever since the JIR team switched from Bridgestone rubber to Michelins at the beginning of the 2005 season. Now, he must find a way to revitalize it outside of the series.

Last man home was Ant West. West was completely at sea all weekend, and the race was no different. After the race was finished, he said he realized where he had gone wrong with the setup, and how to fix it. With testing taking place starting on Tuesday, he can display what he learned on Sunday then.

Be Careful What You Ask For

The MotoGP circus came to Valencia with mixed feelings, fearing that the season would end as it had progressed all summer: with another processional race featuring a Stoner walkover, his rivals unable to challenge, and the only entertainment to be found in battles down the field. But the race had not dismissed those mixed emotions: the threatened demolition of the opposition by Casey Stoner had failed to appear, but in its place came a similar display by Dani Pedrosa. The fans had seen this race before this season, only the order of the finishers was different.

The processional nature of the race did not prevent the Spanish fans from going berserk, however. They had been waiting a long time to see a Spaniard capable of fighting for a win, and finally they had been given what they came for. Pedrosa chose the last race of the year to reassert his authority, and remind everyone why everyone had expected him to be the man most likely to be champion back in February.

In fact, all pre-season predictions have been entirely confounded so far this year. With the rules changing, Honda was expected to destroy the competition, and dominate the series. Instead, it was a tiny factory from Italy and a man dismissed as a chronic crasher who had dominated, crushing the opposition in their path. Before the season started, the pundits and experts were saying that the key to winning would be corner speed and smoothness, the hallmark of a good 250 rider. But the experts got it wrong. Although a 250 rider won the championship, his style was more ragged than smooth, as he wrung the neck of his ferocious Ducati and hurled it round the track. Then, just to add insult to injury, Dani Pedrosa won the final race of the season in exactly the same style, ignoring smoothness in favor of flinging his Honda into every corner, hanging on to the writhing monster on the way in and on the way out.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Now that the race is over, the mixed feelings that the MotoGP followers came here with remain. The winter means 4 months without racing, but it also gives the teams and factories time to regroup. The prospect of the 2008 season is already exciting interest, as testing for next year is due to start this week. Honda surely won't make the same mistake again, and will be back with a much stronger, faster machine for 2008, having already announced that the '08 machine won't be as tightly focused on mass centralization as this year's bike. The satellite Honda teams will get the bike that Dani Pedrosa won Sunday's race on. Michelin have understood that their philosophy of tailoring tires to work perfectly in a very narrow range of conditions has failed under the new tire limits, and are working to build tires which work in a wider range of temperatures.

Yamaha have already officially apologized to Valentino Rossi for failing him this season, and are sure to bring a significantly faster and more reliable bike to the series for next year. Rossi himself will switch to Bridgestones, removing the disparity in tires with the Ducatis. Kawasaki will get a top flight rider to go with the much improved bike they have had this year, and Suzuki get to start the season from position of strength, rather than having to play catch up.

Then there's Marco Melandri joining Casey Stoner at Ducati, sure to create a much closer rivalry within the team. And to cap it all off, there's the arrival of two much-awaited rookies: the reigning World Superbike champion James Toseland; and the man with the largest ego in the paddock - no mean feat in MotoGP - Jorge Lorenzo, in the same pit box, but on different tires, as Valentino Rossi, the man whose post-race celebrations Lorenzo is always trying to outdo.

We may be forced to wait for another 4 months before the racing starts again, but we will have so much to speculate and theorize about during the cold, dark winter nights that March should come round almost before we know it. The speculation starts on Tuesday, once the first official tests start. We can hardly wait.

2007 Valencia MotoGP race result in full.

For anyone who enjoyed the host of apocalyptic disaster movies which appeared at the end of the 20th century, most of which seemed to involve asteroids threatening to destroy the Earth, the atmosphere surrounding the final MotoGP round at Valencia will be instantly familiar. For almost everyone involved, either in staging, racing in, or just plain attending the event, there is a sense that the end of the world is imminent and that they'd better try and cram as much as possible into the weekend, before the endless dark of winter falls.

And so the Valencia circuit and the small town of Cheste nearby is home to Breughelian scenes of frenzied partying. Fans crowd the streets on any kind of vehicle which will bear them, filling the night skies with the shriek of engines bouncing off rev limiters and the thick, acrid smoke of burning rubber, as tires are worn down to the cords before exploding to wild cheers. The smoke, the howling engines, the rampaging bacchanalia, and the inevitable human casualties involved paint a picture more reminiscent of Dante's Divine Comedy than a motorcycle race. Truly, this is a picture of humanity grimly determined to have the best possible time before the end comes.

But it's not just the fans who are in a state of feverish hysteria: inside the paddock, the atmosphere is just frenetic. For many, both riders and team members alike, this is their last chance to secure a future in MotoGP. Mechanics, caterers, drivers, public relations officers, journalists, camera crews, few are sure of a job for next season, only finding out after the Valencia race has finished. And riders in almost every class face uncertainty about whether they'll be able to return to their team, their class, or even the MotoGP paddock next year.

The Last Days

And so Valencia catches many paddock insiders in a bind. On the one hand, it is hard not to get swept up in the end-of-season party atmosphere and spend time socializing with people you've seen on and off all year round, but may not see again, as either you or they could be gone next year. But on the other hand, you have one last chance to shine, to push yourself just that little bit harder and sway the wavering decision-makers in your favor. If you fail, however, you've missed out on your final chance to party with your peers. It's a dilemma which everyone in the paddock solves in their own way.

For the riders, it's relatively simple. Few have very much to lose, and so they can do no more than give it their all one final time. The reasons for risking it all are varied: those who have triumphed all year want a final victory to crown their season; those whose contracts have not been renewed want to prove their team managers wrong, and show they still have what it takes to race competitively; and those to be joined by new team mates want to establish their place in the pecking order, to ensure that they get the new parts first next year, and not the Johnny-come-lately on the other side of the garage.

The Ricardo Tormo circuit at Valencia provides a fitting stage for all that drama. Located just outside the small town of Cheste, the Spanish track sits in a natural bowl surrounded by low hills, adding to the cauldron-like atmosphere. One of the joys of the track is that spectators sitting on the hillsides can see the entire track spread out before them, missing nothing of the action. But the downside to being located in a bowl is that options for the track layout are limited, and the two and a half mile circuit is squeezed into a tiny area. Three hairpins force the track back on itself, maximizing use of the floor of the bowl, while turning the Valencia circuit into something of a go-kart track, with a lot of short straights joined by tight turns.

But Valencia has its saving graces as well. The hairpins allow plenty of passing opportunities, and the infield section of turns 9 and 10, and the flick right at turn 12 provide scintillating spectacle. But the finest part of the track is the long left-hander of turn 13, a downhill slightly off-camber affair where the riders spend an awful lot of time on the edge of the tire. Then, just as the tires start overheating and sliding, the riders have to brake hard at close to full lean for the sharp left which ends the lap and takes them back onto the front straight. A rider who is fearless, fast and foolhardy can pass here, getting into the final turn ahead and getting a jump on their opponents, but the line between winning and losing is razor thin: audacity can take you to the head of the field here, or it can leave you sprawled in the gravel.

The Fast Show

Fearless, fast and foolhardy have all been used to describe Casey Stoner. Last season, the latter adjective would have been used most often, but in 2007, just one word has summed up his riding: Casey Stoner is fast. He is fast from the moment he rolls the bike out of pit lane for his first practice laps of the weekend to the second he crosses the line under the checkered flag, usually first, and often by a significant margin. Stoner's season has been phenomenal, and at Valencia, he could add to that by winning his 11th race of the season, equaling the 2nd highest win total held by Valentino Rossi and Giacomo Agostini, behind only fellow Australian Mick Doohan. Frankly, it's hard to see who can stop him.

There will be plenty of people willing to try, though, chief among whom are Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa. Both men are out for one thing: to blot out the memory of a miserable season with a win. Rossi and Pedrosa had expected to spend the year fighting each other for the championship, but instead, the two of them arrive at Valencia disputing 2nd place, having been comprehensively outclassed by Stoner's perfect package of rider, tires and back much earlier in the season.

Of the two, Valentino Rossi has the stronger hand, holding a 24 point lead over Pedrosa. All he has to do is finish better than 15th, and 2nd place is his. But you can bet your bottom dollar that The Doctor will be out for very much more. Rossi will want to go into the postseason on a high, ready to work on coming back stronger next year, and able to reclaim the title that he believes is his by right. Having lost one title to bad luck, and another title to changes in the rules, Rossi is out for vengeance.

As is Dani Pedrosa. He returns to appear in front of his home fans with just a single win this year, which he considers a very poor total indeed. He needs to win to have a chance of taking 2nd place from Rossi, but as slim as that chance is, that isn't the main factor motivating Pedrosa. The Spaniard wants to prove to his home crowd and to Honda that he is still the man most capable of preventing Valentino Rossi - and Casey Stoner - from taking the title. But most of all, he wants to prove that to himself.

Rule #76

The same has to be said for Pedrosa's team mate, Nicky Hayden. After Hayden won the title here at Valencia last year, Valentino Rossi warned him that the number one plate would be a very heavy burden. Though Hayden took that warning seriously, he could never have imagined just how heavy that number would be. Hayden's year started off disastrously, struggling with an underpowered bike built for his tiny team mate, and he only really started to find his feet after a successful test in Barcelona. Back in Spain once again, Hayden will want to hand over his crown with dignity, and try to put the #1 plate where it belongs.

Another man likely to relinquish his number after Sunday's race is Suzuki's Chris Vermeulen. Vermeulen may bid farewell to the number 71 he has used since he entered MotoGP, and claim the number 7, the number used by his mentor and idol Barry Sheene, currently in use by the departing Carlos Checa. So Vermeulen will be trying to give his old number a decent send off before he switches. But the Australian ex Supersport champ has something more to motivate him: Next season, he will be joined by the veteran Loris Capirossi, and the Valencia race will see the start of the battle for supremacy inside the Suzuki garage.

Over at Kawasaki, Ant West will have no such ambitions. The young Australian will be sharing a garage with Vermeulen's current team mate John Hopkins next year, and there can be no doubt who will be top dog in that team. Instead, West will be concentrating on showing some more progression and riding an error-free race, after two ride through penalties in the last three races.

The man who will be joining West at Kawasaki has a point to prove. Unless John Hopkins wins on Sunday, he will leave Suzuki without ever winning on the bike, the only MotoGP victory so far taken by team mate Vermeulen. The American has been with Suzuki since the dawn of the MotoGP project, and taking his first win at his last race for the team would only be fitting.

Musical Chairs

A Hopkins victory would also suit Loris Capirossi. Capirex is due to take over Hopkins bike at Suzuki after this weekend, and a strong result by the Suzukis would reaffirm the Italian's choice was a good one. But more than confirmation of his future, Capirossi will be looking to win himself, or at least beat his team mate. The Italian veteran is still angry at Ducati for the way he has been cast aside this year, and leaving the team with a win in his pocket would be a very sweet form of revenge.

Marco Melandri is the cause of Capirossi's bitterness, as it was Melandri's signing at Laguna Seca that left Capirossi without a seat at Ducati. Melandri must surely be relishing the chance to take over the factory Ducati seat, arguably the most desirable ride in MotoGP at the moment, especially after such a difficult year on the Gresini Honda. Melandri has complained throughout the season that Honda has not lived up to the promises they made before the season started about supplying him with factory parts, leaving him struggling on the underpowered original version of the RC212V for a long time. Now that his bike is close to competitive, Melandri is sure to try and leave Honda on a high note, to ponder the error of their ways.

Melandri's team mate Toni Elias will also be leaving Gresini to ride a Ducati after Sunday's race. But unlike Melandri, Elias will be joining the young Frenchman Sylvain Guintoli at the Pramac d'Antin satellite squad. Elias will be hoping to build on his strong form of the last 3 races, including a podium in Japan, while Guintoli will want to give the Dunlop tires one final good outing before their probable withdrawal from MotoGP, despite improving results this year.

Taking Guintoli's place at Tech 3 Yamaha next season will be Colin Edwards. The Texas Tornado will want to use his final ride aboard the factory Yamaha to good effect, and stay ahead of Nicky Hayden in the fight for 8th in the championship.

Shinya Nakano will be taking Toni Elias' seat at Gresini Honda, and will be keen to put the nightmare of his year at Konica Minolta Honda behind him. Although the Japanese rider will still be on a Honda next year, at least he will be back on the Bridgestone tires which suit his style so well. Although Nakano would like to end the year on a high, his form on the least supported Honda in arguably the weakest team in the paddock does not leave much room for hope.

While Nakano will be switching from Michelins to Bridgestones, Randy de Puniet will be making the switch the other way, leaving Kawasaki to join the LCR Honda team run by Lucio Cecchinello. With de Puniet already the paddock's most frequent crasher, moving to a tire with less feel at the front seems a strange choice indeed. But before he goes, he will want to show both his old team and his new team just what he is capable of, if he can stay on the bike.

They All Rolled Over, And One Fell Out

The three departing veterans of the MotoGP class will be equally determined to prove that they deserved to stay in the series. Carlos Checa, Makoto Tamada and Alex Barros all leave with greater or lesser degrees of acrimony. Checa's destination is perhaps the best of the bunch, as he will be joining the Ten Kate Honda team in World Superbikes, and is at least guaranteed competitive machinery. But Barros and Tamada face a more uncertain fate. So far, the Brazilian veteran, who has been in the paddock since 1989, looks like being forced to retire, and in a recent interview expressed his disillusionment with the d'Antin team, claiming he was never given the assistance he required to set his bike up properly. Barros was equally displeased with Carlos Checa, claiming the Spaniard took the Ten Kate ride away from him by grossly undercutting his wage demands.

As for Tamada, the former GP winner never really recovered from the decision taken by his team to switch from Bridgestone rubber to Michelins. Since that time, his career has gone slowly downhill, and although Tamada has been linked with a few rides in World Superbike, nothing has been announced yet. Tamada has one final chance on Sunday to earn a ride in a decent team.

The other rider leaving the series is its most recent arrival. Although Chaz Davies has run well since taking over Alex Hofmann's ride at Pramac d'Antin, it has not been enough to secure a permanent ride. So next year, Davies will return to the AMA series, where he will once again contest the Supersport and Formula Xtreme championships. But at just 20 years of age, Davies is still young. There is plenty of time for the Welshman to return to MotoGP in the future. He can take the first step towards that goal with a strong finish on Sunday.

End Of An Era?

The biggest question mark in the paddock hangs over Team KR. After last season's brilliant performance, using only a customer Honda engine and a chassis designed and built in house, 2007 has been an utter disaster. Saddled with the stock, underpowered RC212V engine as supplied at the beginning of the season, the team have struggled to find something in the chassis department to make up for the engine deficiencies. So dispiriting was the task that Kenny Roberts Jr, who started the season, stopped racing halfway through out of sheer desperation at the lack of progress, to be replaced by his brother Kurtis. But without the new engine parts, the team was doomed. Whether they will return for 2008, and how, and with what machinery, is still a complete mystery.

They will, however, be going out in style: the tail of the bike will be covered in messages from fans and supporters of the project, submitted at Team KR's website. Although chronically short of funds and equally short of support from their engine supplier, as the last privateer in the paddock, Team KR have always had a strong following. If the team were forced to leave MotoGP, it would be a huge loss to the paddock, and truly the end of an era.

Goodbye To All That

And so, MotoGP embarks on its final fling of the season, one last weekend of fast and frenzied activity. Some faces will return next season, others will not, but all will be determined to go out with a bang, not a whimper. On Sunday, the 2007 MotoGP season of motorcycle racing ends, much to the disappointment of the fans. Fortunately for them, the 2008 season starts two days later, when the first testing starts. We can hardly wait.

Is the MotoGP series sport or entertainment? That's the question which has gripped and divided the world of MotoGP, both inside and outside the paddock, since roughly the end of July. At Laguna Seca, Casey Stoner had humiliated the rest of the field, beating 2nd placed Chris Vermeulen by nearly 10 seconds and 3rd place man Marco Melandri by over 25 seconds. The week before Laguna, Dani Pedrosa had given the field an even worse drubbing, Loris Capirossi finishing over 13 seconds down on Pedrosa in 2nd. Of the five rounds since Laguna, three had been processional affairs, the race at Motegi had been interesting only because the rain turned the field upside down, leaving only the Estoril round as an exciting spectacle, featuring passing for the lead and keeping the fans on the edge of their seat until the very last lap.

In Italy and Spain, countries where MotoGP is at least as popular as Formula 1 and rivals even the world's favorite sport, soccer, in popularity, viewing figures had plummeted, with TV audiences down by millions of viewers. In part, this is down to the Italian and Spanish fans seeing their respective favorites dropping out of the title race so early in the season. But it's also been caused by the tediously processional nature of the races so far this season. Look at the lap charts for most of the races this season, and they tell a very static story, with one rider — usually Casey Stoner — taking the lead from lap 1 and going on to win unchallenged. At the end of last year, MotoGP fans were taunting Formula 1 fans about how boring F1 was compared with MotoGP, the only passing taking place during pit stops. By the time we left Brno, the shoe was on the other foot, F1 fans countering that, thanks to those pit stops, at least there was actually some passing going on.

Dorna, the company which runs MotoGP and holds the worldwide TV rights for the series, looked on with horror as audiences continued to fall in their key markets. Faced with a potentially serious shortfall in income and decline in both global popularity and, consequently, political influence, Dorna's CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta was forced to act: On Saturday, September 22nd, Ezpeleta proposed changing the MotoGP tire rules from an open market system to a single manufacturer supplying control tires for the series, with all teams getting equal access to the available tires. The reasoning was simple: the current tire rules — introduced with Dorna's full approval at the same time as maximum engine capacity was reduced from 990 to 800 cc, and the fuel allowance was also reduced to 21 liters — were ruining the racing, and killing the spectacle of MotoGP. MotoGP fans support riders, not tire brands, ran the reasoning at Dorna's Barcelona HQ.

Shock And Awe

Ezpeleta's announcement shocked the paddock and unleashed a war of words among MotoGP writers, fans and riders, as well as a great deal of behind-the-scenes chicanery among riders and tire companies about who would get what tires for 2008. Controversy has raged ever since, with fans around the world complaining that the races were boring, and declaring themselves willing to accept almost any technical change if it will see a return to the scintillating action of last year, while the race purists denounce any such a move as a betrayal of MotoGP's underlying principles as a prototype series, and claiming that MotoGP might as well turn into "the Yamaha R6 Cup," as Casey Stoner put it during the press conference at Phillip Island.

Although Ezpeleta subsequently retracted the proposal, claiming that it had helped him achieve his aims of getting the tire manufacturers to agree on a new set of tire rules for 2008, the tire controversy has rumbled on, much of it centering on the two perceived losers under the current rules, Dani Pedrosa, and especially Valentino Rossi. Both men embarked upon the 2007 season expecting to be able to win the championship this season. And both men were unpleasantly surprised at the season opener at Qatar, when they were both destroyed by the top speed of the Ducati, and Casey Stoner's supreme confidence in his bike, his tires, and his ability. It has all gone downhill from there for both men, it becoming quickly obvious that they had little chance of competing against Stoner's perfect package of rider, bike and tires, and that part of that equation, the tires, was completely out of their hands. What made their situation even worse was the perceived lack of urgency at Michelin. Plead as they may, the French tire maker seemed in no particular hurry to sort out the problems which have lost them the championship and seen Michelin runners battle with shot tires after two thirds distance.

Storm Clouds Rising

As MotoGP headed to Sepang, the whole episode seemed to be coming to a head. On the Saturday before the race, the Grand Prix Commission was scheduled to meet, the body which oversees the regulations, consisting of teams, manufacturers, Dorna and the FIM. The hope was that the prospect of the Commission meeting settling the issue once and for all, the focus could return to the action on the track, rather than behind the scenes.

Once the teams turned up at the Malaysian track, however, they had a nasty surprise: Sections of the track had been resurfaced in August, after a previous track resurfacing had left the circuit too bumpy according to the cars which had raced here. With little action at the Sepang circuit since the second resurfacing, the track was incredibly slippery in various places, and arguments started all over again about which tires were finding grip and which tires weren't. The issue was exacerbated by the varying temperatures and fickle weather. The morning sessions were cool, at least by the standards of the tropics, and rain falling intermittently, keeping track temperatures low. But the afternoons were drier, and once the sun came out, track temperatures were sent soaring, making tire selection and finding a setup extremely difficult.

On Saturday after qualifying, the bomb burst. Valentino Rossi, who on Friday had told an Italian camera crew he expected to be on Michelins next year, was rumored to have threatened to retire from MotoGP altogether if he didn't get Bridgestones for 2008, complaining once again that Michelin and Yamaha hadn't worked hard enough, despite all that Rossi had done for them through the years. Rossi's complaints about Michelin were again backed up by Dani Pedrosa, both men struggling with a lack of grip on race tires, despite Pedrosa taking pole position on qualifiers. Once again, we were talking about tires, and rules, and back room deals, and political machinations. As sick as they were of the whole situation, nobody seemed to want to talk about the racing.

A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action

So when the bikes came back round the final hairpin on the warm up lap, and lined up on the grid, the entire paddock was once again praying for some on-track action, and a return to the essence of MotoGP: The struggle between riders and their machines, and the quest to go ever faster. But as the track officials waved the flags to give the all clear, and hastened to leave the track, the incongruent look to the grid jarred the eye, and hinted that all was not quite right.

Any doubts were quickly drowned out by the thunderous roar of 20 MotoGP bikes firing off the line. Though Dani Pedrosa had taken the pole during Saturday's qualifying session, beside him on the front row sat champion-elect Casey Stoner, and rocket man Stoner was off to a flyer as always. The young Australian slammed off the line and shot into Turn 1 ahead of the pack, as he has done almost every race this year.

But the pack were closer this time than they had been for a while. Dani Pedrosa followed Stoner, the front wheel of the Spaniard's Repsol Honda almost touching Stoner's Ducati, while Randy de Puniet had shot ahead of Marco Melandri, the Gresini Honda man losing his 3rd place on the grid to the Frenchman's Kawasaki. As the bikes exited the first two excruciatingly tight corners, and flicked right again into Turn 3, Stoner led the way still, ahead of Pedrosa, de Puniet and Melandri. Behind Melandri, the Gresini / Kawasaki order had been reversed, Toni Elias sneaking round the outside of Ant West to take 5th spot, while behind West, the two Rizla Suzukis of Chris Vermeulen and John Hopkins headed out Loris Capirossi and Valentino Rossi.

Elias' leap up the field from 8th to 5th was not long-lived. By the time the pack flicked left, then right for Turn 6, both Ant West and Chris Vermeulen were back, pushing Elias down to 7th, only for Hopkins to get by one corner later. As they braked hard for the tight left which turns on to the back straight, Hopkins was past team mate Vermeulen as well, and up into 6th.

Leapfrog

Stoner led the field as they raced down the back straight, but Dani Pedrosa, who all lap long had been stuck on Stoner's tail like a piece of old gum, sat right in the Australian's draft. Stoner knew Pedrosa was there, and knew he had to shake the Spaniard before they exited the hairpin at the start of the home straight, to give himself a chance at losing the Repsol Honda before they crossed the line and braked hard again for Turn 1. Likewise, Pedrosa knew that if he was to have a shot at beating the Australian, he had to get into the final corner first, try and hold the Ducati off down the front straight, and stay ahead for as long as could.

Stoner counted on beating Pedrosa on the brakes, and waited until the last instant before slamming on the anchors, kicking out the tail of his Ducati to try and get the bike turned as quickly as possible. But Stoner had left it a few yards too late, and found himself deeper into the turn than he wanted, watching Pedrosa sailing by up the inside as Stoner ran wide. In turn, Pedrosa had apexed early in his pursuit of the Australian, in an attempt to stuff his Repsol Honda up the inside of the Ducati, and hold the line round the outside of the hairpin, to enter the straight ahead. If Stoner hadn't been trying so hard, Pedrosa's move would have succeeded, but once Stoner got his Desmosedici GP7 turned, he was back on the inside of Pedrosa, out of the way of Pedrosa's attempted block, and into the lead again. They crossed the line much as they had entered the final corner, nearly abreast.

As they hit Turn 1 for the second time, the front two were separated by a sliver of nothingness, thick as thieves throughout the lap. Behind Pedrosa, the smallest of gaps preceded Randy de Puniet, with a similar gap back to Marco Melandri and Ant West. But just as hopes grew in the Kawasaki garage, their bubble was punctured: The timing screens flashed up the news that the anomaly on the starting grid had been Ant West, lining up in his old, familiar, four-wide 250 grid spot, not the three-wide spot required by MotoGP. He was officially given a jump start, and would have to come in for a ride-through penalty, just as he had at Motegi. To get two jump starts in three races is more than unfortunate, and betrays West's inexperience in the class.

Do The Shuffle

Behind the front five, the pack was shaking itself out. Toni Elias, having been demoted to 8th by the end of the first lap, had made short order of the dueling Suzukis to take back 6th. But John Hopkins wouldn't let this affront lie, and as they lined up for Turn 4, Hopper tried to make good his deficit on the brakes. He succeeded, but ran in way too hot, running wide, just off the track and onto the grass, losing three places instead of gaining one.

Behind Hopkins, his team mate was under sustained attack from The Doctor. Rossi had got past Capirossi earlier, and was now lining up Chris Vermeulen into Turn 4. He braked, stuffed his Fiat Yamaha onto the inside line and ahead of Vermeulen, and was past. From 10th, Rossi was now back up to 7th, and could start to chase the leaders.

He had a lot to do. Elias was within easy reach, but Elias was nearly 2 seconds behind the man in 5th, Ant West. Rossi would need some help to get back with the front runners, and needed the leaders to start holding each other up.

Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa were doing their best to assist Rossi. Pedrosa was still glued to Stoner's tailpipe, and looked poised to strike at any moment. The only question was where. The most obvious place was at the end of the back straight, going into the final hairpin, but both men knew this. As they chased down towards the hairpin, Pedrosa was not close enough, but pulled out of Stoner's draft anyway, to draw some much-needed cooler air into his RC212V's radiator, and make Stoner aware that he was not alone.

While Stoner and Pedrosa only had eyes for each other, Randy de Puniet and Marco Melandri were starting to close. As they crossed the line to start lap 3, the front duo had become a trio, and Melandri was close to making it a quartet. West had started to lose ground, and was heading backwards to meet the group following.

That group was now led by Valentino Rossi, the Italian wedging his Yamaha ahead of Elias' Honda going into Turn 1. But Rossi was still 2 seconds adrift of West, and nearly 4 seconds behind the leader, Casey Stoner. If he wanted to join the party, he had to up the pace.

Wherever You Go ...

Though the front four were together, they were not close enough to start mixing it up. Pedrosa sat in pool of Stoner's shadow, while de Puniet followed a fraction behind, Melandri a similar distance from the Frenchman. But de Puniet was giving it his all. As they exited turn 8, at the back of the track, the Frenchman clipped the apex just a fraction too early, getting off the rubber laid down during practice and on to the treacherous newly surfaced part of the track, the rear of the bike yoyoing wildly as he opened the gas.

With the Kawasaki briefly derailed, Melandri shot over the rumblestrip and round the outside to get past into 3rd. But only for a few moments, as into the tight left-hander of Turn 9, de Puniet was back past on the brakes, and chasing Pedrosa once again. Having tasted third place, Melandri was now keen for more. A third of a lap later, Melandri was past once again, this time through the complex after Turn 4.

De Puniet wasn't the only Kawasaki rider getting passed. Behind the Frenchman, Valentino Rossi had a shift on. The Doctor had caught de Puniet's team mate Ant West, and was not taking any prisoners. In a brutal move, Rossi barged West aside in Turn 4, leaving the Australian with nowhere to go, except into another mugging by Toni Elias. Despite the harshness of the moves put on him, West had no one to blame but himself, as, dispirited by having had yet another jump start, he had let up his pace just enough to start getting in the way.

At the front of the field, the leaders were as tight as ever, with near to nothing separating Casey Stoner, Dani Pedrosa and Marco Melandri. Once passed by Melandri, Randy de Puniet had quickly ceded half a second to the leaders, and could not claw it back, try as he might. For the next four laps, though the order remained the same, changed threatened at any moment. And lap after lap, down the back straight, Pedrosa pulled out of Stoner's draft, cooling his Honda and letting Stoner know he was still there.

On lap 8, Stoner upped the pace, and smuggled an extra 0.2 seconds from Pedrosa, who was increasingly having to concentrate on holding off Marco Melandri. Pedrosa's factory Repsol Honda held Melandri off with relative ease down the straights, but Melandri could smell 2nd place, and maybe more. Lap 8 went to Pedrosa, but on lap 9, Melandri found a way round, sneaking past through the left-right section of Turn 6, ahead by the time they reached the back of the track.

... There You Are

Taking 2nd place was one thing, keeping it another. Dani Pedrosa, seeing his chance of victory snatched from his hands, determined to get back past. Pedrosa had a slight power advantage down the straights, edging close, and even equal at one point, but at the end of the straight, he had to attack Melandri where Melandri is strongest: On the brakes. Try as he might, Pedrosa could not get past, Melandri holding him off every time in the braking zone.

Melandri and Pedrosa engaged in close quarters combat was just what Casey Stoner needed. Temporarily relieved of pressure from behind, he was free to concentrate on what he does best: Run fast, smooth lap times, trying to build the gap for lap after lap. On lap 9, he set the fastest lap of the race so far, but Melandri was almost as fast, nullifying the Australian's advantage. On lap 10, Stoner was slower, but not by much, while Marco Melandri had his hands full with Dani Pedrosa. Stoner started the lap with three quarters of second advantage, but finished it nearly a second and a half a head. By squabbling over the right to go after Stoner, Melandri and Pedrosa had given him the break he craves, and had given themselves a lot more work to do than they needed. Their only comfort was that there was still over half the race left.

Behind the leaders, Valentino Rossi was giving chase. But chase as he might, The Doctor faced two problems, one in front, and one behind. Ahead of him, Randy de Puniet, though dropped by the leading three, had found his rhythm and was holding station, matching Rossi's lap times almost to the hundredth. When Rossi upped the pace, and gained on de Puniet, the Frenchman responded, making good on the following lap. Both riders were lapping fast, as fast as the leaders, but not fast enough to catch either the front three, or each other.

Behind him, Rossi had to deal with the wild and wonderful Toni Elias. The Spaniard would catch Rossi one lap, before fading the next, only for the cycle to repeat itself again the following lap. Unable to drop Elias permanently, The Doctor had to keep one eye behind him, to fend off any unwelcome advances from the Gresini Honda.

Wild-Eyed And Reckless

In turn, Elias had problems of his own. Another former world champion was on a charge, Nicky Hayden having found his feet after a mediocre start, and was swashbuckling his way up through the field. In Elias, Hayden met his fiercest foe, the Spaniard holding off all of Hayden's thrusts, in Turn 1, Turn 9, and round the section onto the back straight.

As they fired down the straight towards the final corner, Elias risked a look under his elbow to see where Hayden was. The answer was right on his tail, and about to whip out of the draft and past him. But in his eagerness to get past, Hayden had pushed just a little too hard. Ahead going into the hairpin, The Kentucky Kid found himself with more braking to do, and too little space to do it in. In a fit of target fixation, Hayden ran wide, sat up, and rolled off the track, to rejoin down 10th, losing out to the Suzukis and Colin Edwards.

Over the next 10 laps, the race became a contest of fractions of a second. At the front, Casey Stoner was running fast, smooth laps, but the slow broil of the tropics was starting to take its toll. The newly-crowned world champion, normally a paragon of regularity such that you could set your atomic clock by his lap times, was tiring, making mistakes, and becoming that must un-Stoneresque of things, erratic. Stoner's vacillation left room for Melandri chasing him, but Melandri was riding in the same heat and humidity as Stoner. Worse for Melandri, the Italian's drinking tube had malfunctioned, filling his helmet with moisture, and splashing water all over his neck and into his helmet. Melandri had to face the twin difficulties of a lack of water to drink, and gathering water in his helmet, with the ensuing worry that his visor could fog.

Closer

The laps counted down, and gaps swung back and forth, Stoner pulling out nearly a 2 second advantage by lap 16, only to see it reduced to just over a second two laps later. With three laps to go, and 1.1 seconds to close, Melandri was still in with a chance. But on the next lap, Casey Stoner put in the 4th fastest lap of the race so far, taking over half a second from the Italian, and giving himself enough of a cushion to bring it home for his 10th win of the season, equaling the third-highest total number of wins in a season, shared with Valentino Rossi and Giacomo Agostini. Once again, Stoner had been strong, and run the race from the front. But the weather, and the proximity of Pedrosa and Melandri had prevented the Australian from dominating as he is used to. The gap to the rest of the field is starting to close.

Marco Melandri closed the gap the most. Melandri was delighted with his 2nd place, regarding it as a triumph after a difficult year on the Gresini Honda. Melandri has been extremely vocal in his criticism of Honda, after they had been very slow to provide him with engine and bike upgrades which he believed they had promised him before the season started. Melandri had been looking for a way to demonstrate to Honda just what a mistake they'd made, and at Sepang, he found it. He leaves Honda to join Casey Stoner at Ducati next year, and if this race was anything to go by, Stoner could have a much tougher time defending his title than he had winning it.

Close behind Melandri, Dani Pedrosa came home in 3rd, surprised that his tires had lasted. All weekend long, Pedrosa had worried about tires, as everything he had tried from his allocation had lacked grip, or lost grip, and his experience in Australia last week, when his tires faded badly during the second half of the race, had not given him much room for optimism. But Pedrosa's tires lasted well, allowing him to take his 7th podium of the year, and recover a few points in his battle for 2nd place in the championship with Valentino Rossi.

A second and a half behind Pedrosa, Randy de Puniet came home a steady 4th, eventually ceding little ground to the front runners to take his second best result of the season. Whether he will be as successful at LCR Honda as he has been at Kawasaki remains to be seen.

Up And Down

Valentino Rossi was both pleased and disappointed by his 5th place. Like Pedrosa, The Doctor had started the race with little confidence in his tires, but as the race had progressed, the tires kept going, and kept going better, with Rossi setting his fastest lap of the race, beaten only by Casey Stoner, on lap 20 of 21. It remains to be seen whether Rossi will jump ship to Bridgestones at the end of the season, but the race at Sepang may have given him something to ponder before deciding whether to ditch the Michelins.

Behind Rossi, Toni Elias came home in 6th, not close enough to Rossi to challenge, and far enough ahead of the Suzuki battle to be sure that it was not under threat. Elias had looked like catching Rossi several times during the race, but seemed to lose ground as quickly as he lost it, his spectacular riding style pleasing the fans, but not paying the dividend he might hope for.

Behind Elias, the epic Battle of the Suzukis was finally won by Chris Vermeulen, after John Hopkins last-lap do-or-die move to pass his team mate failed. The dice between the two team mates was the most entertaining fight of the whole race, and just the kind of battle that TV audiences, fans, and Dorna want to see. Sadly, it was only for 7th place, and so did not get the TV coverage it deserved, the directors choosing instead to focus on the tension at the front. But Vermeulen's 7th spot gave him a precious point in the championship fight for fifth place, now just 4 points behind team mate Hopper.

Behind the Suzukis, Nicky Hayden had recovered one of the places he lost in the overeager passing attempt on Elias, getting by Colin Edwards to finish 9th. Behind Edwards, another battle of similar bikes had raged, Loris Capirossi successfully defending the honor of the factory Ducati team by beating Alex Barros on the Pramac d'Antin satellite bike for 11th.

The New Boy

Another duel had been fought for 13th, Suzuki's wild card rider Nobu Aoki finally beating LCR Honda's Carlos Checa. Aoki had debuted the prototype of the 2008 Suzuki GSV-R, and the new bike was regularly to be found near the top of the maximum speed charts. The Suzukis have looked good so far this year, and could be even stronger in 2008.

Ant West took the final point in 15th, after the misfortune of having a ride through penalty at the track with the longest pit lane of the series, over a thousand yards of 40 mph, while your competitors blast past you at closer to 200 mph. By the time he rejoined the race, he had lost over 30 seconds, any chance of running with the leaders completely gone.

Behind West, Shinya Nakano came home in 16th, his long-suffering year on the Michelin-shod Konica Minolta Honda nearly over, a fact he will be surely relieved about. Chaz Davies brought the second Pramac d'Antin Ducati home in 17th, after struggling to find a setup all weekend, and amid rumors that Toni Elias would take the open seat at the team for 2008, leaving Davies out of MotoGP.

The two Dunlop Tech 3 Yamahas finished 18th and 19th, Makoto Tamada beating his young team mate Sylvain Guintoli this time out. The Dunlops never really worked at Sepang, leaving Tamada and Guintoli out of contention, and making Dunlop's job of finding a team to use its tires with next year almost impossible.

The only team the Dunlops could be an option for is Team KR. Kurtis Roberts' 20th place aboard the KR212V, which has received no engine upgrades at all from Honda this year, has not made the team's quest for sponsorship any easier, and Dunlop will surely have money to spend if it wants to stay in MotoGP.

Show Or Go?

If the 2007 MotoGP round at Sepang started amid a raging argument about whether MotoGP needs more show, or should stay a purely technical pastime, the race had done little to settle the argument one way or the other. While the debate had centered around tires, the race left onlookers with no further insights to help them make up their minds. Neither Bridgestone nor Michelin had dominated, but then the tires had not behaved as expected at all. Where tires were expected to go off quickly in the tropical heat, instead they lasted, and even got better. Of the 20 riders on the grid, all but 4 of them did their fastest lap in the second half of the race, 5 of them setting their fastest times in the last 3 laps in the grueling, tropical conditions.

However, worryingly for the technical purists, who want to see as few rules as possible, the best action on the track came from two pairs of riders on the same bikes and tires, with the Suzukis fighting tooth and nail for 7th, and Barros and Capirossi having a private Ducati battle for 11th. Similar tires and similar equipment seemed to have created closer racing, supporters of the control tire were keen to point out. Closer, but slower, the purists countered.

So we leave Sepang in the same position that we arrived here, with the fight for the future, or perhaps even the soul of MotoGP still raging. On Friday, one of the battles will be fought and settled, as the Grand Prix Commission settle rules on tires, and we learn whether Valentino Rossi will get the Bridgestones he believes he needs to be competitive. But the underlying war will continue: Is MotoGP sport, or is it entertainment?

If MotoGP is to remain a pure sport, where manufacturers compete in open warfare on technology, what is to stop the richest company from just pouring more money into its program, and dominating the series? What is to become of the rider, as technology advances, and more and more control is taken out of the hands of riders, and managed by computers? And who is going to pay for all this technology, if TV audiences disappear, and sponsors lose interest?

But if MotoGP is entertainment, why bother with expensive technical development at all? Why not just supply every rider with the same bikes and the same tires, and let the best rider win? MotoGP weekends already feature one spec class, the Red Bull Rookies Cup, how hard would it be to supercharge the idea to get it ready for the premier class? And if that fails, why not fix the racing, to make sure that the riders stay bunched together, and no one can build up a big lead? If it works for NASCAR, why shouldn't it work for MotoGP?

Heart And Soul

The war rages on, and it may rage on indefinitely. It is a war of principles, a war that encapsulates the very essence of MotoGP. Every advance in technology threatens the control which riders have over their machines, but great riders may still find a way to leverage that technology better than lesser riders. And every once in a while, a rider such as Mick Doohan, Giacomo Agostini, or maybe even Casey Stoner will dominate the series. Is there a way to stop that domination happening? And if there is a way, should you use it?

Full results of the 2007 Sepang MotoGP Race.

As objects to look at, motorcycle racing tires are neither particularly impressive nor very interesting. They're round, black, shiny when new, matte when used. Some are wider than others, some are larger than others, some have a taller profile, some have a rounder profile. Some tires are covered in a system of grooves, to channel surface water away from the body of the tire, and allow it to grip, others are smooth as an eight ball. The only splashes of color on tires come from the manufacturer's logo and the yellow bar code, used to track the riders' tire quotas during a MotoGP weekend.

So it may come as some surprise to find that these rather dull-looking rubber rings have been the center of attention of the MotoGP world for at least the past month. For although they might be thoroughly mundane to look at, the tires are arguably the most important part of a racing motorcycle, and ironically, the only part of a racing motorcycle that the motorcycle manufacturer does not and cannot produce in-house. Honda, Yamaha, or even Ducati can invest as much time and money as they like in designing engines to produce as much horsepower as possible, but if the tires they choose are not able to transfer that power to the track surface, then all of that effort is to no avail. Similarly, Suzuki and Kawasaki can spend millions of dollars researching the optimum weight distribution, center of gravity, steering rake and trail and swing arm length to allow their motorcycles to switch direction as quickly as possible, whilst maintaining stability in a straight line, but if the tires are unable to cope with the forces involved in extreme lean angles, or the shape of the tire resists being flicked from side to side, then those research dollars might as well have been spent on chroming the tailpipe, and gold-plating the fairing.

Hence the ruckus which has been brewing almost since the start of the season, as the rules which were meant to remove Michelin's geographical advantage seem to have played into the hands of Bridgestone's technical advantage. Over the past few weeks, pressure has been building around the issue, with talk of some teams going to Bridgestone, then Bridgestone refusing to supply them. Dorna threatened to impose a single tire maker on the series, then Carmelo Ezpeleta withdrew the threat again. The dramatic climax came when Valentino Rossi hinted darkly that he could still decide to switch to Bridgestones for next year, much to the surprise of Jorge Lorenzo, his team mate for next year. Meanwhile, Dani Pedrosa, who held off signing a new contract with Honda over tires, was suspiciously coy about the issue.

Can We Talk About Something Else Now?

Frankly, once practice started at Phillip Island on Friday, there was some relief that we could get back to talking about racing again, and stop talking about paddock politics. But Phillip Island is a very special place, for many reasons, and the unpredictable weather, with squally showers alternating with dry, sunny periods, complicated by strong blustery winds coming in off the Bass Strait, meant that once again, the talk was all about tires, which ones might work in the conditions, which ones might be needed if the conditions changed, and whether one type of weather favored one manufacturer or another. Debate raged on, only to abate a little after qualifying, where the top six places were shared out evenly between Bridgestone and Michelin runners, with Dani Pedrosa taking a convincing pole with one of his best laps of the season, ahead of Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner, the former two on Michelins, the latter on Bridgestones. But just as we thought the issue had started to slip from the limelight, at the post-qualifying press conference, Rossi intimated that he could switch tire makers, and Stoner made a few gibes about champions changing tire brands when the going got difficult. Once again, it was tires dominating MotoGP, not racing.

On Sunday, fickle as ever, the spring weather along Australia's southern coast pitched in to settle the issue. On the afternoon of the race, Phillip Island was sunny, dry, and warmer than it had been all weekend. These were conditions which no one had practiced in, leaving everyone guessing as to what tires to run. Although the talk was still of tires, it was no longer about unfair advantages, it was about who had gambled right. Phillip Island is one of the toughest tracks for tires, with the bikes spending a very long time on the left hand side of the tire at very high speeds. Other tracks usually have hotter track temperatures, but Phillip Island sees the hottest tire temperatures of the year. With track temperatures several degrees higher all of a sudden, having a tire that could last suddenly became a priority.

Deafening Silence

As the lights faded from red, and the riders unleashed the pent-up fury of hundreds of horsepower, the deafening roar finally made talk about tires impossible, and all eyes were on the racing once again. The pack was led by a bright red bullet, as Casey Stoner got away from the line as if fired from a gun. A Repsol Honda shadowed the Australian's Ducati, but it was not the bike of polesitter Dani Pedrosa, but rather that of Nicky Hayden. Deposed as world champion at the last round, Hayden was set on salvaging some pride from his star-crossed season, and started by heading into the first turn, Doohan Corner, ahead of team mate Pedrosa, with Valentino Rossi slotting his Fiat Yamaha into 4th position, in front of the Ducatis of Alex Barros and Loris Capirossi.

By the time the pack had rounded the Southern Loop and headed back towards the Honda hairpin, Capirossi had put his factory Ducati ahead of Barros' satellite bike, while behind Barros, Marco Melandri had shot up the field to 7th from 12th on the grid, ahead of Shinya Nakano and John Hopkins. Hopper had made a similarly spectacular start, shooting to 9th from 14th. At the front of the field, it looked like being business as usual, Casey Stoner leading the field as they snaked their way across the fast, flowing Phillip Island circuit. Stoner eked out a gap round the first half of the track, only to see it closed down in one fell swoop, as Nicky Hayden plummeted down Lukey Heights into MG, hitting the brakes and hanging on to Stoner's tail.

As they crossed the line for the first time, Stoner still led Hayden, but only by a couple of tenths. A fraction behind, Pedrosa led Rossi, The Doctor right on the Spaniard's tail, while Loris Capirossi followed in their wake. Barros held 6th across the line, but lost it to Melandri just yards later, last year's winner determined to try for a repeat win here.

Casey Stoner leading a race is a very dangerous man, and anyone with ambitions of victory faces a stark choice: catch him before he's gone, or admit defeat. Seeing Stoner ahead, Valentino Rossi knew he had to get on to Stoner's back wheel before the Australian champion did his usual disappearing act. Rossi's problem came in the pint-sized shape of Dani Pedrosa and his Honda RC212V. But most problems can be solved, and the Doctor found his remedy by closing Pedrosa down through the Southern Loop, then whipping out of the Spaniard's draft through Turn 3 to stuff his Yamaha up the inside of Pedrosa into the Honda hairpin. Pedrosa resisted at first, but then succumbed.

Tally Ho!

Once past, Rossi was free to attempt to chase down Casey Stoner, a task he has been faced with all too often this season. Knowing he had no time to lose, he set about it with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. Which was just a little bit too much as it turned out, for as Rossi piled on the power round the 120 mph left hander of Turn 12 leading back on to the front straight he ran wide on to the rumble strip, then wider on to the grass, kicking up a big cloud of dust, forcing him to back off a fraction to get back on to the track and terra firma, allowing Pedrosa to sneak back past and into his way again.

Fortunately for Rossi, his fears of Stoner disappearing into the sunset on his own had not yet come to pass. Despite Stoner pushing with all his might, he still had the Kentucky Kid for company. Hayden was right on Stoner through the first few turns, but as the lap progressed, the Australian inched his Ducati away. More than Hayden might like, but not enough to break the tow, and make good his escape.

Behind Hayden, Rossi had recovered from his excess of fervor, and was right back on Pedrosa's back wheel. He started lining the Spaniard up through Siberia, getting ready to pounce at the top of the hill, before swooping down into MG and 3rd place. But Pedrosa knows the score at Phillip Island as well as The Doctor, and kept the door firmly shut as they rounded the hairpin at the bottom of the hill, then blocked as Rossi tried to push him through Turns 11 and 12, smoke pouring off Rossi's rear tire as he powered the bike round the interminable left hander.

Where Rossi failed, Melandri succeeded. Rossi's battle with Pedrosa had allowed Loris Capirossi to close up, with Marco Melandri right behind. Where Pedrosa succeeded in fending off The Doctor's unwelcome advances at the bottom of MG, Capirex met with less success, Melandri stuffing the nose of his Gresini Honda ahead of Capirossi's Ducati through the hairpin, and into 5th.

Braking Is Hard To Do

Rossi may have been denied at MG, but he was not deterred. As Pedrosa started to pitch his Repsol Honda into the Southern Loop for the 4th time, he found a Fiat Yamaha in his way, Valentino Rossi having forced his bike up the inside, and into 3rd. But Pedrosa is as stubborn as Rossi about being passed, and the Spaniard hung on to Rossi's Yamaha round Turn 3, before trying to wedge his Honda ahead of Rossi into the Honda hairpin. But Rossi is a hard man to outbrake, and as brilliant a rider as Pedrosa is, very hard braking remains his weak point, and as his RC212V fishtailed on the brakes, Pedrosa ran wide, and instead of gaining a place from Rossi, he lost a place to Melandri, now in full flight forward.

With Stoner ahead, but still being chased hard by Hayden, behind the leaders, the pursuit was taking some kind of shape. Now past Dani Pedrosa, Rossi was inching closer to Nicky Hayden, though with over a second to make up. The fight for 4th was not yet settled, however, with Pedrosa resolved to make good his mistake and take back 4th place from Melandri. He chased the Italian's Hannspree Honda for all of lap 5, lining Melandri up through Turn 12 before blasting past and into 4th over the line and into Doohan. But while Melandri knows that he can't compete with the factory Honda on top speed, his strength is Pedrosa's weakness, and as they flicked left through Turn 3, Melandri closed on Pedrosa, then brutally jammed his Honda ahead of Pedrosa's on the brakes, leaving Pedrosa with nowhere to go except down into 5th.

If Melandri were to stay ahead of Pedrosa, he had to get enough of a gap to prevent the Spaniard blasting past on the front straight again. As the pair fired round the flowing river of tarmac that is Phillip Island, Melandri gave it his all, but it was not enough. As they crossed the line to start lap 7, Pedrosa was once again past Melandri, and into Doohan in 4th place. With the Honda hairpin approaching, Melandri knew what he had to do, but Pedrosa knew it equally well. Melandri forced his way ahead again into the hairpin, but Pedrosa had taken a wider line, to apex later. As Melandri ran slightly wide, the inevitable consequence of such a hard pass on the brakes, the wily Pedrosa sneaked back underneath and back into 4th, his racecraft belying his tender years.

Crunch Time

At this stage, all concerned knew the next few laps would be crucial. Previous races had seen Stoner up the pace and break his pursuers, getting away to win by a big margin. And after being feted as the new world champion after his return to Australia, he was intent on becoming the first Australian to win his home Grand Prix since Mick Doohan in 1998, the man Stoner is so often compared to. Having clinched the title already, he had nothing left to lose, and it showed, his Marlboro Ducati snaking under him as he pushed it as hard as he could.

If Stoner was pushing hard, behind him, Nicky Hayden and Valentino Rossi were pushing just as hard. After an abortive attempt at learning to ride the Honda RC212V like a 250, Hayden had returned to his wild, hang-it-all-out, dirt-track style earlier in the year, and luckily for him, this is also the best way to get around the Phillip Island track. Try as Stoner might to break Hayden, he could not dislodge last year's champion from his back wheel, the gap hovering between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds. And while Stoner tried to break Hayden from in front, Rossi attacked from behind, trying to close the gap to the Kentucky Kid to turn the duel at the front into a three-way fight. But where Hayden was holding station against Stoner, Rossi was losing ground, a tenth of a second at a time.

By the end of lap 9, it was looking like turning into a straight fight between Hayden and Stoner, but on lap 10, disaster struck. In one lap, Nicky Hayden lost nearly 1.5 seconds as his engine lost power, putting in a lap of 1'32.3 against Stoner's 1'30.9. He lost another second on the following lap, allowing Rossi to get ahead, and a second again on lap 12, before his engine finally gave up the ghost, dropping a valve and seizing up entirely, Hayden pulling to one side, signaling frantically with his foot to his team mate Pedrosa to pass on the left, to allow Hayden to pull off the track and out of the race. Nicky Hayden, the nicest, politest man you could hope to meet, was livid, as angry here as he had been at Estoril last year, but for entirely different reasons. His body language made clear that a stream of invective was being shouted into his helmet, and a couple of vicious punches to the tank made eloquently clear where the problem lay.

Hayden's retirement is indicative of Honda's difficulties in keeping up. HRC have found the horsepower they needed to keep up with the Ducati, but as the only manufacturer still using conventional valve springs to close the valves, they are running into reliability problems keeping the engine running at the necessary revs. The engine is generating large amounts of heat, and that heat is killing the engines. In a normal year, Honda engines are the very pinnacle of reliability, but so far this year, the 800cc V4 has failed publicly several times, including Toni Elias' exit in clouds of smoke at Barcelona, and Nicky Hayden's engine explosion during practice at the Sachsenring, scattering a trail of engine parts down the front straight, and triggering a rather unsightly scramble in pit lane to bag a few souvenirs.

Home Free

With Hayden no longer standing between Rossi and Stoner, The Doctor was free to go after the Australian champion. But though gifted the opportunity, Rossi was no longer able to give chase. The hard pursuit over the past few laps were starting to take their toll on Rossi's Michelins, his lap times dropping from 1'31.0 down to 1'31.6. But Rossi wasn't the only one to pay the price of the hostilities over the past few laps: Casey Stoner's Bridgestones were also showing signs of fatigue, the Australian's lap times starting to drop, a sign of just how hard he'd had to push to stay ahead of Hayden. However, where Rossi was half a second slower, Stoner was losing just two tenths a lap, and pulling away.

Once Hayden had gone, what everyone had feared might happen came to pass. Casey Stoner, with less pressure to face from behind, could focus on riding smoothly for lap after blistering lap, building an insurmountable lead within the space of the next 6 laps. By lap 17 of 27, Stoner was over 6 seconds ahead and completely out of reach. In yet another display of faultless riding, the newly crowned Australian champion went on to take his home Grand Prix, becoming the first home winner at Phillip Island since 1998, and the first Bridgestone winner here ever. On the podium and after the race, Stoner was elated, saying that this win was the most important win of the season and meant almost as much as winning the world championship. The crowd got what it came for, to see their new young hero win, in the form he has shown all season.

While Stoner may have had the race sewn up, there was still a podium to fill, and a host of hungry candidates. Rossi's pace had slackened enough for the men behind to start catching him. At first, Pedrosa and Melandri followed together, their Hondas close enough to resemble a single machine at some parts of the track, but on lap 16, the tire issue reared its ugly head again. Only this time, it wasn't the Michelins of Dani Pedrosa which were starting to go off, it was the Bridgestones of Marco Melandri. The Italian had gambled on a medium compound tire, and while this had allowed him to keep with Rossi and Pedrosa during the first half of the race, now that strategy was starting to unravel. Melandri's lap times plummeted from low 1'31s to mid 1'32s on lap 16, then high 1'33s on lap 19, to end up in the 1'35s. As his times plummeted, so did his position, sliding back down the order, his hopes of a podium as destroyed as his rear tire.

Best Of The Rest

That left Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa to slug it out for the podium. Pedrosa crept closer to Rossi, until he was close enough to use the power of his Honda to edge ahead of Rossi at the end of the straight and into Doohan corner. But getting ahead is one thing, staying ahead is another. With Rossi right on his tail, Pedrosa demonstrated just how hard staying ahead was out of the Southern Loop and through Turn 3, his Honda quivering like plucked guitar string as they rocketed down towards the Honda hairpin.

The tussle between Pedrosa and Rossi for the remaining two spots on the podium was fierce, but worked against them. While the Honda and Yamaha were holding each other up, Loris Capirossi had finally gotten past the ailing Marco Melandri and was closing on Rossi. Pedrosa had passed Rossi on lap 18, but by the next lap, the two-way dice had become a three-way fight. From Siberia to the line, the three were close enough to see the stitching on each other's leathers, and down the front straight, Capirossi unleashed the massed hordes of Bologna thoroughbreds to power past Rossi and into Doohan in 3rd place. But Capirex can do more than just use excess horsepower, and as the three picked their bikes up to flick into the Southern Loop, Capirossi had stuffed his Ducati up the inside of Pedrosa's Honda as well. Two passes in two corners: After his win at Motegi three weeks ago, Capirex was back, and he meant business.

Pedrosa's travails were not yet over: two corners after losing out to Capirossi, the Spaniard was outbraked by Valentino Rossi going into the Honda hairpin. For the third time in the race, the Repsol Honda rider lost out at the Honda hairpin. Pedrosa hung on bravely for another attempt at Rossi a lap later, but it was not to be. By lap 23, Pedrosa's shot at the podium was over.

That left two men in the race for the remaining spots on the rostrum: Loris Capirossi and Valentino Rossi. For three laps, Rossi pushed Capirossi as hard as he could, but the Ducati veteran was unleashed. Capirossi was the fastest man on the track, and Rossi's tires were starting to give up the ghost. On lap 24, Rossi had no more to give, losing over a second on Capirossi, and the podium was settled.

Crowning Glory

Loris Capirossi's ride to 2nd place was outstanding in more ways than one. Not only did it confirm Capirossi's return to form, finally getting to grips with the 800cc GP7, it also clinched the constructor's and team championship for Ducati, and gave them another 1-2 after Troy Bayliss' win at Valencia in 2006. If Casey Stoner didn't quite clinch the title in the manner he might have wished, he and Loris Capirossi certainly helped secure the manufacturer's title in style.

The last place on the podium went to Valentino Rossi, The Doctor riding his Fiat Yamaha home to take 3rd, satisfied he had done all he could, but unhappy that his Michelin tires had not quite lasted long enough to stay at the front all race. Rumors after the race suggest that he will have the Bridgestones he so desires next year, but time will tell whether getting what he asked for is the panacea Rossi believes it will be.

Dani Pedrosa missed out on the podium, coming home in 4th spot, and even more disappointed than Rossi. Like Rossi, Pedrosa must be hoping for a tire switch, as his complaints about his tires were more vocal than Rossi's. While little has been said about it, if Rossi makes the switch to Bridgestone, the odds must be very strong that Pedrosa will follow.

Behind Pedrosa, Alex Barros had ridden a lonely race to bring his Pramac d'Antin Ducati home in 5th place, after losing touch with the leading group on lap 5. With 3 Ducatis in the top 5, there can be no doubt that the Italian bikes work exceptionally well here in Phillip Island.

The 6th spot was more tightly contested: Kawasaki's Randy de Puniet and Suzuki's John Hopkins had scrapped for the position almost all race long, the Frenchman finally coming out on top after Hopkins made a mistake going into Doohan corner, leaving Hopper with 7th as consolation.

Thrill Seekers

The fight for 8th position saw the most entertaining action of the day. For most of the race, Chris Vermeulen, Colin Edwards, Carlos Checa, and Ant West had fought a thrilling battle for supremacy, the order changing almost every lap. In the end, it was Chris Vermeulen who came out on top, taking 8th behind his Suzuki team mate, ahead of Colin Edwards in 9th. Both Vermeulen and Edwards had struggled to find a set up all weekend, Vermeulen having problems with the wind, while Edwards suffered with a lack of grip, so both men were extremely relieved to at least have been able to fight mid-pack, fearing ending up as tail enders.

Marco Melandri ended up splitting the mid-pack scrap, managing to bring his completely shot tires home in 10th place, the slowest man on the track for much of the second half of the race.

Carlos Checa finished 11th on the LCR Honda, ahead of Ant West, the Australian Kawasaki rider ending up at the back of the mid-pack group. Shinya Nakano came home in 13th, after losing touch with the group halfway through the race.

After his spectacular 4th place finish in Motegi, Sylvain Guintoli was very disappointed to finish in 14th, the Dunlop tires not working as well at Phillip Island as they did in Japan. But Guintoli still got his revenge on Toni Elias, the man who took the podium from him at Motegi, the Spanish fan favorite taking the final point in 15th.

Guintoli's team mate Makoto Tamada came home in 16th, just ahead of Kurtis Roberts on the KR212V. For most of this season, the Team KR bike has been the perennial backmarker, denied the engine upgrades already provided to the other Honda teams. But for the first time in a very long while, Roberts was able to fight for a place, and looked like avoiding finishing last, but he lost out on the final lap.

Change Is The Only Constant

The run up to the Phillip Island MotoGP round was dominated by the issue of tires, and the one thing that Dorna must have feared most was that tires would be at the center of the race as well. As it happened, tires were central to the result, but not in the way that Dorna had feared: As a result of the variable and difficult climatic conditions, the riders and teams ended up gambling on their choice of tires. Some of those gambles paid off, while others went disastrously wrong, but no one could point the finger at one tire brand or another being dominant.

The fact that the Marlboro Ducati team gambled correctly speaks volumes. All year long, Casey Stoner hasn't put a foot wrong, and that consistency has been rewarded with a MotoGP title. But it hasn't just been Stoner who has done things right, the factory Ducati team have been very close to perfect race in, race out as well. Wrapping up both the manufacturer's title and the team title at Phillip Island was the crowning achievement of some astute guesses, some ingenious design, and an awful lot of hard work by the Ducati team, and was very well deserved.

The good news for the rest of the field was the narrowness of Stoner's margin of victory. Where the young Aussie had the race wrapped up after the first 7 or 8 laps, this time out, he had to work a lot harder, for less of an advantage. What's more, if Nicky Hayden's engine hadn't blown up, the outcome of the race might have been very different indeed. If Hayden had been able to dice with Stoner, that could have allowed Rossi to catch up at the front, and given Stoner a lot more trouble than he was left with in the end. But ifs count for nothing in racing, where the only reality is the cold, harsh print of the results sheet.

The Phillip Island race made it clear that Honda and Yamaha are closing the gap to Ducati, and Michelin is getting closer as well. That's the nature of competition: sometimes it takes a real humiliation of the dominant player in an area to get their attention, and force them to adapt to the new circumstances. Casey Stoner's world championship, on Bridgestone tires, has achieved just that, for Michelin, for Honda, for Yamaha, for everyone. Stoner has been at the center of a perfect storm this year, but the tide is starting to turn. It won't be anywhere near as easy next year.

Full result of the Phillip Island MotoGP race.

There is something about the Circuito do Estoril which just exudes drama. Firstly, there's the location: Situated just a few miles from Portugal's wild Atlantic coast, with only a few hills between the track and the ocean, the next stop past the beach is Atlantic City, New Jersey. And being so close to what can be a tempestuous and impetuous body of water means that Estoril's dramatic location is often matched by dramatic climatic conditions, with the weather throwing a curve ball right in the middle of the race.

It's not just the location, however. The track itself is a pretty dramatic affair, boasting the surprising combination of being the track with the slowest average speed, yet having a 200 mph front straight. But what makes the track really dramatic is the way that high top speed is converted into the low average. First of all, at the end of the front straight, the riders have a ton of speed to shed for the tight right hander, which then flicks back left onto the next turn, making both inside and outside passes viable options into Turn 1. Then, there's the section around the back straight: Two 180 degree turns, too wide to be hairpins, connected by a straight with a blindingly fast right-hand kink. If you need to get past the rider in front of you, you can either do it through the first part, Turn 4, the fast kink of Turn 5, or the double left hander of Turn 6.

If that fails, there's the uphill section which follows Turn 7: A quick flick right before one of the toughest chicanes of the series, comprising Turns 9 and 10. If anyone every asks you what a block pass looks like, sit them down overlooking these corners, and lap after lap, you'll see riders blocking out of Turn 8 and into 9, and out of 9 up the steep climb to Turn 10. Anyone you've just passed then has the Esses to try and get back in front, before rolling down the hill and round the seemingly everlasting Parabolica, the right hander which goes on for ever before leading back onto the front straight. The Parabolica is a glorious corner, with plenty of room to try and get round the outside of the person ahead of you, if you're brave or foolish enough to try it. And if you can't get round the outside, then you have time to maximize your drive out of the corner and onto the straight, where the finish line is far enough away to leave you with a chance of pulling out of the slipstream and into the lead.

There's No "I" In Team

With a layout as varied as that, the track lends itself to spectacle. And the spectacle doesn't get any better than last year's Portuguese Grand Prix. Valentino Rossi came into the race trailing Nicky Hayden by 12 points, with just two races to go. If Rossi was to retain his title, then he was going to need some help. At first, that help came from Rossi's team mate Colin Edwards, who gave a masterclass of block passing and defensive riding all throughout the race, first passing Hayden and Pedrosa to take points away from them, then holding them off while Rossi got away at the front. Then, Rossi's help came from Nicky Hayden's Repsol Honda team mate, when Dani Pedrosa attempted an incomprehensibly optimistic pass up the inside of Hayden, taking the then championship leader out of the race, and seemingly out of contention for the title.

But there was more to come. Although The Kentucky Kid was gone, The Doctor wasn't getting it all his own way. First, there was Kenny Roberts Jr riding the wheels off the KR211V, and putting in one of his strongest performances since taking the world title back in 2000. And then, there was the wild spectacle of Toni Elias. Elias looked as if he was doing everything wrong, but was beating everyone else on the track. There was his spectacular motocross-style berm-busting line through the double left handers. There was his braking point into Turn 1, which seemed to be at least 20 yards later than everyone else, and looked like launching the Spaniard into the Atlantic Ocean every time the group hit the end of the straight. And finally, the icing on the cake, there was that dazzling last lap, where Elias led, Rossi laid a brutal block pass through the chicane, and Elias held the outside line through the Parabolica to power out of Rossi's slipstream at the very last moment to take the win by the smallest margin of victory in living memory. The single MotoGP race at Estoril in 2006 had more drama than a library full of Shakespeare plays, and a winner who saved his seat in MotoGP with that ride.

Time For Change?

So the 2007 edition of the Portuguese Grand Prix has a lot to live up to. And for the first time in 3 races, this weekend's event looks like we could see the return of some close racing. For a start, the track has sections which favor both the straight-line speed of the Ducati, the extreme agility of the Yamaha, Honda, and Suzuki, and play into the hands of the balance of the Kawasaki. So although the Ducati will still be hard to stay with down the kilometer-long front straight, the Yamahas, Hondas and Suzukis should be able to make a break through the back of the track, and especially through the chicane and the Esses. The Ducati certainly struggled here last year, with Sete Gibernau the fastest qualifier in 8th, and Loris Capirossi the first Ducati home in 12th place, a fact which will surely cheer the opposition.

And then there's the tire situation: the world of MotoGP has talked of little else since the early summer, and the debate seems to be reaching a crescendo, with the details of modifications to the current restrictions likely to be finalized shortly after the weekend's racing finishes. But Estoril could make a mockery of expectations on Sunday. While Bridgestone has utterly dominated the proceeding so far this year, it was a very different picture at Estoril 11 months ago, with Michelin taking the top 5 spots, and probably more if the Repsol Honda team hadn't imploded so badly. John Hopkins was the first Bridgestone rider home, and right behind Hopper came Carlos Checa, then aboard the Dunlop-shod Tech 3 Yamaha. The question is, can Michelin retain the advantage they had from last year, or will the huge leap forward which Bridgestone has made allow them to dominate the tire wars once again?

Valentino Rossi, for one, has his hopes vested in Michelin. With Yamaha's new pneumatic valve engine closing some of the horsepower gap with the Ducati, Rossi has a chance of at least staying with Casey Stoner down the front straight. But more than that, The Doctor will be hoping that Michelin can provide him with some extra grip to allow him to get away from the Australian round the slow, technical section at the rear of the track, and end his longest streak without a podium ever. Although he is still in with a mathematical chance at the title, an 85 point deficit with 5 races to go is as good as insurmountable, and Valentino Rossi and Jeremy Burgess, Rossi's crew chief, are already focusing on preparing for next year's championship, and less on trying to catch Stoner this year. That doesn't mean that Rossi will go down without a fight, though, and if the tires work at Estoril, Sunday could turn into a genuine scrap.

Making Up Is Hard To Do

The Repsol Honda boys will be looking to mix it up in that scrap, should it appear. Both Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden come to Estoril hoping to exorcise the demons of last year's farce, and both have points to prove. Hayden wants to get back into his podium groove, which saw him get on the box at every race since Assen. Or rather, at every race except the ones he was taken out by other riders, with John Hopkins doing for The Kentucky Kid at Laguna Seca, and Randy de Puniet repeating the deed at Misano. Hayden's fortunes have revived to a great extent since the beginning of the season, and he'll be looking to keep this going in Portugal.

His team mate Dani Pedrosa is going through an even more difficult time than Valentino Rossi. Honda's anointed champion has been able to do little more than follow this year, his and Honda's sole victory coming when the weather conditions played into Michelin's hands, the heat at the Sachsenring confounding the Bridgestone runners. So great is Pedrosa's frustration that he still hasn't signed the contract which HRC have offered him, reputedly holding out for a switch of tire suppliers, putting him at odds with team mate Hayden, who has called upon Honda to remain loyal to Michelin. With all the factory seats taken, realistically, Pedrosa doesn't have any other option but to sign on the dotted line, but he will be battling to gain all the negotiating leverage he can this weekend. The first order of business will be to beat his team mate, something he is finding harder to do every race.

But if the Michelins can't compete, that won't mean that Casey Stoner will have it all his own way. The Suzukis have been getting closer and closer to the Australian, and at a track as tight as Estoril, both John Hopkins and Chris Vermeulen must believe they can challenge for the lead. Hopper is tantalizingly close to taking his first win in MotoGP, after getting on the podium 3 times this year, and will want to win on a Suzuki before he moves to Kawasaki at the end of the year.

As for Rizla Suzuki team mate Chris Vermeulen, the Australian will be looking to stay ahead of his team mate in the championship, to consolidate his position as lead rider for next year, when he'll be joined by the Italian veteran Loris Capirossi. Vermeulen has already strengthened his hand by winning at Le Mans and taking a couple of 2nd places, but he'll be wanting to build on that in Portugal.

And of course there's Toni Elias. Last year's winner must be feeling pretty confident coming into Estoril, despite the fact that he's still recovering from the spiral fracture of the thigh he sustained at Assen. With his superb race from last year as an example, and with tires that have been working all season, Elias could well be right up at the front once again this year.

Surprise, Surprise!

Although a repeat of last year's drama is unlikely, if not downright impossible, there could still be a few surprises. The team most likely to be providing those surprises is the Tech 3 Yamaha team: Last year, both Carlos Checa and the man who replaced him, Makoto Tamada, put in very strong showings at Estoril, proving that the Dunlops were capable of performing in Portugal. Although Tamada's season has been traumatic so far, Sunday could be the day he regains some of the dignity a former GP winner deserves. But to do that, he'll have to beat his team mate as well. Sylvain Guintoli has impressed a lot of people so far this season, and did well at Estoril last year in the 250 race. If the Dunlops work as well this year as they did 11 months ago, Guintoli could be the surprise of the weekend.

Over at Kawasaki, surprises are less likely, with Randy de Puniet wanting to make amends for crashing out of his 4th race of the season at Misano. His first priority will be to stay on board, and get into the top 5 once again. Ant West's task will be similar, to continue to build on the steady performances he has shown since taking over Olivier Jacque's ride after Catalunya.

For former Kawasaki rider Shinya Nakano, it's crunch time. Not just his future in MotoGP, but the future of the Japan Italy Racing team, the team behind Konica Minolta, rides on how the Japanese star does on Sunday. Nakano has finally received some of the upgrades the other Hondas had earlier in the season, but like Makoto Tamada before him, he has struggled to make the transition from the Bridgestones to the Michelin tires. He has also had the terrible luck to have switched to Honda and Michelin in their worst year in MotoGP history, and has not coped well. Sunday is make or break time, with a result outside the top 10 almost certain to see the demise of the team, and most likely, Nakano's MotoGP career.

An Unstoppable Force

The one man in no danger whatsoever on Sunday is Casey Stoner. Stoner can wrap up the title in Portugal if he scores 15 points more than Rossi, and loses less than 4 points to Pedrosa, with 4 full rounds to go. Scoring 15 points over Rossi is going to be a big ask at a track like Estoril, but it will surely only be postponing the inevitable. For despite the Ducati's advantage being seriously diminished round Estoril's tight and twisty sections, and despite Bridgestone's weak record at the track, it would be high folly indeed to discount the Australian championship leader, the man who has dominated the series so far this season.

A victory at Estoril would also be strangely fitting for Stoner, for last year's Portuguese Grand Prix was pivotal in the young Australian's career. On lap 2 of last year's race, Casey Stoner lost the front end of his LCR Honda, crashing out of the race and taking Sete Gibernau with him. A few hours later, he took Gibernau's ride at Ducati as well, effectively ending the Spaniard's career. At the time, most observers thought that Ducati were mad, bringing in a rider who saw only the volatile Randy de Puniet crash out of more races than him. Today, those observers cannot believe just how wrong they were. Stoner hasn't crashed out of a single race this year, in defiance of the predictions of the naysayers. The chances of him breaking this streak at Estoril are about as great as him not taking the MotoGP championship this year. Stoner's perfect year looks set to continue. But first, there's the small matter of a race on Sunday.

For many years now, the Grand Prix of the Czech Republic at Brno has been a turning point, a fulcrum around which the fates and fortunes of all those involved in MotoGP pivot. Its singular position has much to do with the race's place in the MotoGP calendar, coming as it does at the end of the long summer break. Despite the fact that already, well over half the races have been run, Brno is regarded as the midpoint of the MotoGP year, and signals the start of the second half of the season.

This is largely because although the racing stops for the summer, in factory research and development departments, in team workshops, in tire development facilities, and in gyms all over the world, teams, manufacturers, and riders have all been hard at work, developing new parts for the bikes to make them turn faster and make more power, testing new rubber compounds and tire constructions to improve grip without sacrificing durability, and honing fitness and strength levels to cope with the immense physical and mental strains of racing in MotoGP.

Brno is also the place where the season which is to follow starts to take shape. Teams want to have their rider line-up clear for next year, their sponsors signed and their budgets sorted, just as riders want to be sure they have a contract for the next season, on a strong team with competitive machinery and a generous salary package if possible, or on a second-rate bike on a tiny team for no wage at all if necessary. Brno is the place where teams, manufacturers and riders start to build, towards the end of the season, and the foundations for next year.

Fighting Back

Last year, Brno was even more pivotal than usual. Valentino Rossi arrived at the Czech track trailing championship leader Nicky Hayden by 51 points, and having given up on his title aspirations after a string of incredibly bad luck left him out of contention. Rossi vowed to go out and enjoy himself on the track and try and win as many races as possible. Nicky Hayden, on the other hand, was concentrating on not making mistakes and conserving his lead, despite constantly being given new parts to test by Honda. With Rossi finishing 2nd here, and Hayden only taking 9th, the tables turned, and The Doctor embarked on a thrilling title chase which eventually went down to the wire, decided at last by the final race of the season at Valencia.

This year, Valentino Rossi once again arrived at Brno behind in the championship standings, hoping to turn his season around and repeat last year's remarkable comeback, but with one crucial difference: This time, Rossi is determined not to let the title slip through his fingers.

But there are more differences between this year and last: Though Rossi's deficit going into the race was only 44 points, and not 51, the shortfall was not down to bad luck. This year, The Doctor, his Yamaha M1 and the Michelin tires he uses have been comprehensively outclassed by Casey Stoner on the Bridgestone-shod Ducati. No luck is involved at all, just some astute guesses about what it would take to build a race-winning 800 cc MotoGP bike, and a highly talented and eminently confident rider, capable of taking what has been given him and turning it into an unbeatable package. And where last year, Rossi rid himself of the distraction of a possible move to Formula 1 by staying in MotoGP, just a week ago, the Italian tax authorities announced they will be pursuing Rossi for tax evasion, making it even more difficult for the 5 times MotoGP champion to concentrate on racing. If Rossi wanted to force a change in fortunes, he had to start here.

Domination Time

The first day of practice was not encouraging for The Doctor. Despite the anomaly of the young Frenchman Sylvain Guintoli setting the fastest time on a qualifying tire in the afternoon's free practice session, the day belonged to Casey Stoner, the Australian championship leader picking up where he left off at Laguna Seca, consistently being the fastest rider on race tires by a comfortable margin. Saturday did not improve Rossi's outlook: Once again, Stoner was fastest in both sessions, by almost a country mile. Even a brake malfunction and an oil leak early during qualifying couldn't faze Stoner, the Australian sitting calmly in the pits waiting for the Ducati engineers to finish fixing his bike. Forty minutes later, Casey Stoner took his third pole position in a row, and looked set to stage a repeat of Laguna Seca.

Valentino Rossi would have to start his fight back from down in 6th spot on the grid, behind not just Casey Stoner, but also Dani Pedrosa, the man challenging Rossi for 2nd place in the title hunt, and his team mate Nicky Hayden, whose fortunes and demeanor have revived since he gave up his championship defense as a hopeless task, saddled as he has been with a bike that was designed for someone much smaller, and without sufficient horsepower. As the bikes rolled up to the line, and red starting lights lit up, Stoner's rivals knew they had their work cut out.

The Chase Is On

The lights dimmed, engines roared, and as the bikes powered off the line, Rossi's job got a lot harder. Casey Stoner had once again got his jet-propelled start, firing into the long right-hand Turn 1 ahead of the chasing pack. Behind Stoner, Dani Pedrosa edged ahead of John Hopkins, the Spanish Repsol Honda man taking full advantage of his front row start. With Hopkins charging through from the second row, Nicky Hayden lost a place, while behind Hayden, Loris Capirossi followed his Marlboro Ducati team mate's lead and picked up a couple of places, entering Turn 1 in 5th ahead of Randy de Puniet and Valentino Rossi.

Dani Pedrosa would not enjoy his 2nd place for long: As the field braked hard before flicking left for the first of the many left-right S bends which are such a feature of the Brno circuit, John Hopkins swung inside and deftly stuffed his Rizla Suzuki up the inside of the Spaniard, taking over Pedrosa's leading spot in the hunt for Stoner. Seeing Hopkins take one Repsol Honda, Loris Capirossi tried his hand at the other. Slipping up the inside of the Kentucky Kid, Capirex drew level, but as they flicked right for the second part of the S bend, Hayden held station, forcing Capirossi outside, and back into 5th from whence he came.

Once Hopkins was past Pedrosa, he was quickly on Stoner's tail, opening up a gap back to Pedrosa, traffic starting to accumulate traffic behind the Spaniard. Nicky Hayden sat almost impaled on the razor-sharp tail of his team mate's RC212V, Loris Capirossi peering over Hayden's shoulder for a glimpse of the action.

Having lost a place at the start, Valentino Rossi moved to get it back. Biding his time behind the Kawasaki of Randy de Puniet, he lined the Frenchman up coming out of Turn 8, the first part of the double left-hander in the stadium section. Getting more drive out of 8, Rossi drew level on the short straight, before easily outbraking the Kawasaki into Turn 9, and turning his attention to the riders ahead. And one specific rider in particular.

Closer

As they crossed the finish line for the first time, Casey Stoner led, as he has so often this year. A fraction behind was John Hopkins, with another tiny gap back to Dani Pedrosa, who was hard at work trying to shake off the unwelcome attention of Hayden and Capirossi. His resistance was not long-lived, as Nicky Hayden made a wily move into Turn 4, choosing the outside line of this very wide track, before deftly sliding up the inside of Pedrosa as the track flicked back right for Turn 5. It was a classic Brno move, using the width of the track and the S bend combinations to force your opponent's hand in one turn, just to stick it to him on the next.

Once past, Hayden dropped Pedrosa straight away, leaving the Spanish prodigy to fend off the unwelcome attentions of Loris Capirossi. Pedrosa blocked, holding the Italian off all the way up the steep hill back to the finish line, parried another attempt into Turn 1, but as they braked hard for Turn 4, Capirex whipped out of Pedrosa's slipstream and hammered on the brakes, taking the inside line from the Spaniard, and with it, 4th place.

As they crossed the line for the start of the lap 4, the field was starting to splinter. Casey Stoner led from John Hopkins, but Stoner's advantage was anything but decisive. What's more, that lead had been gained the easy way, while Hopkins was being held up by Pedrosa on the first lap. Since passing Pedrosa, Hopper had slowly been gaining on Stoner, a few hundredths of a second at a time. During the practice sessions, Hopkins had been the only man who could stick with Stoner's pace, so the task ahead of the Anglo-American was to run the fast, consistent times he'd shown on Friday and Saturday to get close enough to take his shot at Stoner. But while Hopkins is outstanding at running fast, smooth laps, Casey Stoner is perfect. Seeing Hopkins close a few hundredths on lap 4, on lap 5, Stoner responded, dropping his lap time while Hopper lost a little, pulling an extra half a second from Hopkins, increasing the gap to over a second.

Moving On

But Hopper wasn't ready to surrender just yet. Once again, Hopkins started to reel Stoner in a few hundredths at a time. With 15 laps of the race left, a tenth here and a few hundredths there would be all Hopper would need to get Stoner in range, allowing the Suzuki rider to pounce when he was ready. For three laps, Hopkins closed, but then, Stoner struck once again, putting in another blistering lap, nearly 3/10ths faster than his previous lap, and enough to break Hopkins resistance. Now the gap was 1.5 seconds, and Hopkins strategy of a few hundredths at a time would no longer suffice.

While Stoner's and Hopkins' lap times were so close that you couldn't fit a timing sheet between them, the difference with the rest of the field was telling. Nicky Hayden was running a strong but lonely race in 3rd, but was still surrendering nearly half a second a lap to the front two. But while Hayden was slower than Stoner and Hopkins, he was fast enough to stay ahead of the bunch behind him.

That bunch were far from settled. Stung into action by Capirossi's pass, Dani Pedrosa latched onto the tail of the Ducati and pressed to get the position he'd given up back. For nearly two laps, he peeked, and poked, and tried to find a gap he could squeeze his tiny frame through. Eventually, on lap 5, Pedrosa found a way: Gritting his teeth and hanging on to the tight line through Turn 6, he eased ahead of Capirex on the short straight between the second part of the double right hander, holding his line through 7 to convincingly snatch back 4th position from the Italian.

Damage Control

Capirossi's forward progress had stalled. Once Pedrosa had passed him, he now had Valentino Rossi to contend with. By lap 7, Rossi was already 8 seconds down on Stoner and pulling points back was looking beyond his reach. The Doctor's only option now was damage limitation, trying to keep the number of points conceded to a minimum. But to do that meant passing as many people within his reach as possible, starting with Loris Capirossi. Rossi's first chance came immediately after Capirex was passed by Pedrosa, the Spaniard's pass allowing Rossi to get on the pair's tail. He looked up the inside at Turn 9, then Turn 10, but couldn't get close enough to force Capirossi aside. Two turns later, with Rossi welded to his tailpipe, Capirossi's used the raw power of the Ducati to gain some breathing space, motoring up the hill back to the finish line, with Rossi's Yamaha painfully short of the grunt needed to follow Capirex.

The pattern repeated itself over the next few laps, with Rossi all over the back of Capirossi through the turns, only to lose out up the hill, the terrain playing into the hands of the Ducati. With Rossi stuck behind Capirossi, holding each other up in vying for 5th, Randy de Puniet and Chris Vermeulen were able to join the party, 5th to 8th places concertinaing like cars on a slack tow rope. Capirossi, seemingly confused by the sudden cacophony of engine noise behind him, looked back to check who was behind him, and in doing so, let Rossi past.

Rossi had clawed back more precious points, but in taking such a long time getting past Capirossi, he'd let Pedrosa get away. Now over 2.5 seconds down on 4th place, The Doctor had a mountain to climb.

A Day At The Office

The mountain to the win was already impossible to scale. Valentino Rossi was over 9 seconds down on Casey Stoner, and over a second a lap slower. From lap 9 onwards, Casey Stoner was the fastest man on the track, his lead building lap after lap to eventually take victory by nearly 8 seconds, in almost a carbon copy of his win at Laguna Seca. Once again, Stoner had dominated from the moment his Ducati rolled out of the transporter in the Czech Republic, taking the pole, fastest lap and the win, while barely breaking a sweat. Casey Stoner now has 7 wins from 12 races, and is becoming something of an unstoppable force. With another intimidating performance at Brno, Casey Stoner took another big step towards the 2007 MotoGP world title on Sunday.

Behind Stoner, John Hopkins rode home to his second ever podium and his best ever finish, a feat which he celebrated with one of the finest stand up wheelies ever to grace a MotoGP race. Any speculation that Hopper would be distracted by his move to Kawasaki next year was comprehensively banished. On the contrary, with his future settled, Hopper seems more determined than ever to bag that elusive first win in MotoGP. It is Hopkins' misfortune to have encountered an apparently indomitable Casey Stoner just as the Suzuki has come good for the American.

Joining Stoner and Hopkins on the podium was Nicky Hayden. The reigning world champion is back on the box once again, for the third time in four races. Hayden and his team have found some solutions to the problems the Kentucky Kid had with the RC212V at the start of the season, and the stream of parts emerging from HRC in Japan are helping. Not by a significant amount, and certainly not enough to get Hayden in contention for the win, but the world champion can run with the front of the field again, in a position more fitting for the #1 plate on his bike.

While the podium was settled early, the rest of the places were disputed almost to the line. Fourth place looked safest, Dani Pedrosa keeping hold of 4th despite a charging pack behind him. First Valentino Rossi tried, but failed, to close down the Spanish Repsol Honda rider, then  Chris Vermeulen took over the baton. Vermeulen's attempt was more successful, lapping consistently faster than Pedrosa, but by the time Vermeulen started his charge, he was too far behind to catch the Spaniard, and Pedrosa rode home to take a comfortable 4th spot, and valuable points in his chase for 2nd place in the championship. Despite that, Pedrosa's face as he entered the pits was a picture of frustration, and the signing of Pedrosa's new contract which HRC keep saying is imminent looks further away than ever.

Blue Thunder

With the top 4 places apportioned, the struggle for 5th grew more intense. With Rossi past the Ducati of Capirossi, The Doctor started to stretch out a gap over Capirex, taking advantage of the tooth-and-nail battle which raged behind him. Having given away 5th, Capirossi dug in his heels, determined not to concede any more places. Seeing de Puniet slip past him following in Rossi's wake at Turn 15, Capirossi unleashed the Beast From Bologna down the straight, and was back ahead of the Kawasaki as they braked for Turn 1. Once forewarned, the Italian made himself wider than ever, fending off everything the Frenchman could throw at him.

Meanwhile, de Puniet  had to turn his attention from the red bike ahead of him to the blue bike behind, as he struggled to hold off the hard-charging Chris Vermeulen. The Australian Suzuki man was making his customary surge forward, as he settled into a fast rhythm after another indifferent start. Once latched on de Puniet's tail, it was merely a matter of time before Vermeulen was past. In the event, it took Vermeulen just under two laps, and once past de Puniet, his next target was Capirossi. Another two laps later, and Vermeulen had dispatched the Ducati as well, stuffing his Suzuki up the inside of Capirex into Turn 12 as they began the long drag up the hill.

Next up was Rossi, but The Doctor would surely present a more difficult target. Rossi had snatched a half-second gap while Capirossi had been holding up the trio behind, and created some breathing space between himself and the bunch. Some, but not enough, as Vermeulen was running so hard that he was with Rossi in a heartbeat. Once again, it was merely a case of delaying the inevitable, the delay lasting for two laps, before Chris Vermeulen shoved his nose into Turn 10 ahead of the Yamaha to take 5th, Valentino Rossi seeing another precious point leech away to Casey Stoner in the title chase.

But The Doctor had more pain to come. His tires had surrendered most of their grip, and try as he might to hold of a resurgent Loris Capirossi, once again, it was just a matter of time. Two more laps of bitter struggle, and Capirossi unleashed the Beast once again, leaving Rossi standing over start and finish, and down in 7th. With 5th surrendered to Chris Vermeulen, and Loris Capirossi with a firm grip on 6th, it was all Valentino Rossi could do to hang on to 7th place ahead of Randy de Puniet, who pushed him all the way. It had been another grim day at the office for Rossi, and he'd given away another 16 points in the championship to the invincible Casey Stoner, an immeasurably valuable sum.

Forgotten Heroes

While the fight for 5th had been gripping, the fight for 9th had been better yet. Alex Barros, Carlos Checa, Toni Elias, Anthony West and Sylvain Guintoli had slugged it out for most of the race. Guintoli had had the upper hand early on, the Frenchman putting on yet another impressive performance on allegedly inferior rubber, but his Dunlops only started losing grip with some 7 laps to go. Alex Barros finally got the best of the fight, putting on a strong charge through the field from 13th on the grid to finally take 9th place, and building a comfortable gap once past Guintoli.

Carlos Checa finished 10th on the LCR Honda, having to scrap hard for every position, holding off Toni Elias on the Gresini Honda. Elias' ride was heroic, despite finishing a lowly 11th, as the young Spaniard is still recovering from a very nasty spiral fracture of the femur. He had described his fitness as 60%, so if Toni Elias at 60% can deliver 11th place, Elias at 100% should be a formidable prospect indeed.

Behind Elias, Anthony West finished in 12th, a solid ride from the Kawasaki rider, who had struggled to get to grips with the Brno track all weekend, ahead of Sylvain Guintoli, the Frenchman's Dunlop tires failing him in the end. Guintoli looked like being out of a job at the weekend, with Colin Edwards, who had crashed out on the second lap, the favorite to take the remaining seat at Tech 3 Yamaha, the seat currently occupied by the French rookie. But Guintoli has surprised a lot of people this year, and his performance at Brno may have been enough for him to secure a ride with the Pramac d'Antin Ducati squad for 2008.

Behind Guintoli, there loomed a literal and figurative gap back to Shinya Nakano, the Japanese rider unable to get much benefit from the new parts he'd finally received for his Konica Minolta Honda. Nakano's move to Honda has been nothing short of disastrous, and murmurings can already be heard that he may return to his roots at Kawasaki for 2008.

Calling Mr Dante

Taking the final championship point in 15th was Kurtis Roberts on the KR212V. Team KR's new chassis has given them a half a second a lap improvement, but the team is at the very bottom of the food chain for Honda engine parts. Roberts is using the same underpowered engine his brother started the season with, and can only hope that they will soon start receiving the engine upgrades Nakano got this weekend at Brno, to allow the team to make another step forward. While they wait, they continue to languish in the 8th layer of MotoGP hell.

Between Team KR and Makoto Tamada, the sole occupant of the 9th and deepest level of MotoGP's inferno, Ivan Silva finished a workmanlike 16th on the Pramac d'Antin Ducati, not putting his contractually binding position as first reserve rider for the team to any particular effect. But he still finished ahead of Tamada on the other Tech 3 Yamaha, the lost soul in the frozen wastes of MotoGP, and the one rider who can be absolutely sure that this will be his last season in the series.

No Room For Doubt

Brno, as ever, proved to be a turning point in the season. To Valentino Rossi's bitter disappointment, it was not the turning point The Doctor ordered, but the point at which Stoner's position in the championship changed from strong into unassailable. Casey Stoner now has a 60 point lead in the title race, with 6 races left to go. What's more, Stoner is in the midst of a perfect season, the young Australian withstanding everything that Rossi throws at him, and never putting a foot wrong. Every race on the calendar makes clearer that though the Ducati is good, and the Bridgestone tires are excellent, the thing that's making Casey Stoner's season so flawless is Casey Stoner's exceptional talent.

The question is no longer whether Stoner will be the next MotoGP world champion, but rather when. Stoner's perfect year could become even more of a fairy tale, with the young Australian likely to wrap up his title at his home Grand Prix at Phillip Island in mid October. Looking round the paddock at the competition, the only thing capable of stopping Stoner is bad luck, and a sea change in his fortunes. Going by the rest of this season, Fate seems otherwise inclined.

Brno race results

MotoGP Championship standings after Brno