Archive - Aug 2008

Motorcycle News' Matthew Birt is reporting that Dani Pedrosa will be switching to use Bridgestone tires effective immediately after the Misano race. It was widely anticipated that the Repsol Honda team - or at the very least, Dani Pedrosa's side of the garage - would be switching to the Japanese rubber for next season, after Pedrosa expressed his disgust with Michelin's failures in no uncertain terms after the Brno round. Pedrosa's unhappiness went so far that his manager, Alberto Puig, even tried to organize a boycott of the Brno GP by the Michelin riders, on the rather questionable grounds of safety. Michelin dismissed this claim, saying that the tires may have been off the pace, but there were no safety issues. MCN also revealed that HRC's manager Masumi Hamane was actually behind this attempt.

Now, in a shock and unprecedented move, Pedrosa will switch tire brands in the middle of the season. Pedrosa and Repsol Honda organized the deal with Bridgestone and Dorna to allow the Spaniard to make the move immediately. Dorna needed to be involved, as the rules state that the FIM and Dorna must be informed if teams decide to switch tire makers mid-season. Again, according to MCN, only Pedrosa will switch to Bridgestones, with Pedrosa's ostensible team mate Nicky Hayden remaining on Michelins.

Nicky Hayden is to skip Sunday's race at Misano. After skipping Sunday morning's warmup, the American elected to skip the race. Hayden is still suffering too much pain from the heel injury he sustained at the X Games Supermoto event, and was a couple of seconds off the pace.

Hayden is hoping that skipping the Misano race will allow him to heal more quickly, leaving him in a better position to contest the next event, the Indianapolis GP. Hayden regards this as his home GP, being the nearest race to his native Owensboro, Kentucky, and is determined to do well there.

The fact that four MotoGP races are being broadcast on network television in the US is great for the profile of the sport, but not so good for regular fans. For it means searching about on schedules to find exactly when the race is going to be broadcast.

Fortunately, there's the TV Racer website, which was evidently created to cope with exactly this kind of problem. And it tells us that the Misano MotoGP round is to be broadcast in the US on Speed, rather than on CBS. Broadcast time is 11pm EDT. So set your DVRs accordingly.

The weather has been a factor at just about every race so far this season, usually by being treacherous, changeable and unreliable, so the relief with which several days of calm, predictable and warm weather is being greeted is entirely understandable. With no exceptionally cool mornings, or dry days followed by wet days, teams and tire makers are glad to be able to work consistently on a setup, and getting ready for the race.

Casey Stoner would probably be fine without the setup time. Stoner was back to his old tricks in the free practice sessions, taking just 4 laps to get onto the top of the timesheets, and relinquishing that position only very briefly during all three sessions. So it was hardly a surprise to see Casey Stoner taking provisional pole on his 3rd lap out of the pits, and cracking into the 1'34 bracket - faster than anyone but himself had been so far this weekend - on the next lap.

By the end of his first run, Casey Stoner held provisional pole with a lap of 1'34.763, nearly half a second ahead of the rest of the field. Stoner was once again exerting his authority on the rest of the field, and setting the mark to measure the rest of the field by.

Behind Stoner, things were a good deal more interesting. Fortunately for Michelin, their tires were working well at the circuit, as Jorge Lorenzo and Randy de Puniet were mixing it up near the top of the timesheets, and were obviously competitive with the Bridgestones. With quarter of the session gone, Lorenzo held the 2nd fastest time on his Fiat Yamaha, while Alice Ducati's Toni Elias showed that his good result in Brno was a sign of more to come, with the 3rd fastest time, ahead of Valentino Rossi.

But the times were pretty close. Apart from Casey Stoner, who was over 0.4 seconds ahead as the session approached the halfway mark, just half a second covered the 2nd to 10th spots on the grid. It was clear that once the qualifiers went on, a tenth of a second could be the difference between being on the front row or the third row of the grid. The wait was on for the first rider to go out on soft rubber.