Suzuki

As promised, the MotoGPMatters.com 2009 Racing Calendar is finally available for purchase! At either US$15 for residents of the USA and Canada, or EUR15 for the rest of the world (both plus shipping and handling), the calendar is a must-have for any motorcycle racing fan, and is the perfect gift or stocking filler for lovers of bikes and great photography. It is also an indispensable aid in planning your life so you don't miss out on any of the great motorcycle racing we expect to see in 2009.

You need to find a corner piece to start

Clean room

E?

The rain returned to Valencia on Tuesday, and the track saw little action, most riders going home. Only 7 riders hit the track in the afternoon, and as a few days earlier, Nicky Hayden was quickest in the wet.

The times:

Times from the first day of testing at Valencia. These will be updated as soon as official times are available. All times were set using the new standard tires provided by Bridgestone, with a choice of either a soft or a hard compound available. For comparison, see the fastest lap each rider set during the race on Sunday.

Times courtesy of GPOne.com and Motociclismo.es. 

Times at 5pm, the end of the test:

Fastest lap of each rider during the race on Sunday:

The long and desperate history of Jorge Aspar Martinez and his attempts to enter MotoGP reached at least a temporary conclusion in Malaysia. The deal the Spaniard had with Kawasaki to run a third factory bike finally foundered on Kawasaki's insistence on Shinya Nakano as the rider, while Aspar's Spanish sponsors wanted a Spaniard. Martinez told Kawasaki that he would run Nakano if Kawasaki shared the costs, but the Akashi factory demanded that Aspar pay the full costs of the project.

But this had been the last page in an extended history: Aspar had turned to Kawasaki after his rider Alvaro Bautista refused to ride a Ducati, and the team had only examined Ducati as an option after a potential deal with Suzuki fell through. In the end, and with the Kawasaki in the shape it is in in 2008, the deal falling through may well be a good thing for the project.

For the Spanish sports daily Marca is reporting that Aspar is back talking to his first choice of motorcycle supplier. According to Marca, Aspar's Spanish sponsors have acquiesced to provide sponsorship for the factory Suzuki MotoGP team - currently Rizla Suzuki - on the condition that Aspar gets a third factory bike to run in MotoGP from 2010. That new team would then see Alvaro Bautista step up from 250s to move into the premier class, hopefully after wresting the world title from Marco Simoncelli.

There is some substance to this deal, as since Rizla withdrew sponsorship from the team run by Crescent Racing in British Superbikes, speculation has been rife that the manufacturer of cigarette rolling papers might withdraw - or reduce its involvement - from the MotoGP team as well. If Martinez can bring money to the factory Suzuki team, that would give him a very strong claim to a bike for 2010.

Though it really is far too early to even be thinking about the 2010 MotoGP silly season, it seems that reality is starting to intervene. The 2010 roundabout starts here ...

The qualifying practice session at the Sepang MotoGP round was to be the penultimate time that the MotoGP riders were to experience the exhilarating and terrifying levels of grip provided by qualifying tires, scheduled to disappear once the single tire rule was introduced. But at the start of the session, it didn't look like they would get to use them at all, the rain appearing between the morning and afternoon sessions having soaked the track.

Two riders had made sure that they would use qualifying rubber, as Kawasaki had decided to send both its riders out on soft tires at the end of FP3. The team had seen the weather forecasts, and mindful of 2006, when the grid was set on the basis of the results in free practice, Ant West and John Hopkins had used one of their qualifiers gambling on the official qualifying session being rained out.

It was a smart move, leaving West sitting pretty at the top of the timesheets, shortly before the rain came down. But sadly for West, the rain did not come in sufficient quantity to wash out qualifying, and so the entire grid went out to start the afternoon session on rain tires.

What the riders found was a track that was wet, but drying very slowly, the tropical sun unable to penetrate the thick clouds, and so the initial laps were well off a fast pace, Shinya Nakano the first person to hold the fastest lap for any significant length of time.

The Japanese rider was looking very strong. Every time someone took the fastest lap from him, Nakano responded. His first serious time was a lap of 2'18, a time which Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner then bettered, before Nakano took the top time back again with a 2'17.905.

Next up was Chris Vermeulen. The wet weather master was into the 2'16 bracket before Nakano struck back once again, with a time of 2'15.686. But Nakano's dominance was about to come to an end.

As the halfway mark approached, Valentino Rossi took back provisional pole by a tenth of a second, before ceding pole to Nakano once again, then duking it out with this Fiat Yamaha team mate Jorge Lorenzo over who would start from the front of the grid.

This little contretemps took the pole time down from a 2'14 into the 2'11s, before Andrea Dovizioso started to get involved. The JiR Scot Honda rider was starting to take big steps forward, dropping his times by a second a lap for the next three laps. With just over 20 minutes to go, times were heading into the 2'08s, and the track was starting to show a proper dry line for large parts of the track.

At the beginning of the session, Dani Pedrosa's pole time from last year, a lap of 2'01.877, looked completely out of reach, but as the track continued to dry, and the lap times kept falling, suddenly, it didn't seem such a foolish notion after all.

Due to personal circumstances - a long-deserved and hard-earned (by my wife) vacation in Spain - there won't be an Indianapolis race report for a week or so. Which is a real shame, as the race had plenty of incidents to talk about.

As a consolation, here's the transcripts of the podium press conference, as well as a selection of quotes from some of the riders involved in the race. Thanks to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and their amazingly efficient PR team for providing the information so quickly and smoothly.

For most of this year, qualifying has followed a reasonably predictable pattern. A couple of laps after his out lap, Casey Stoner would seize pole position, gradually turning the thumbscrews on the rest of the field. About halfway through the session, Randy de Puniet would be the first rider out on qualifying tires and snatch pole from Stoner. His glory would be short-lived, however, lasting only until Stoner threw on the first set of qualifiers, then the process would repeat itself, the only real question being how big Stoner's margin would be over the rest, and whether Valentino Rossi would manage to qualify on the front row.

The inaugural Indianapolis MotoGP race was anything but predictable, and turned into one of the most fascinating and thrilling sessions of the entire year. This may have been due to the fact that the session was the first truly dry outing of the weekend, with both Friday's sessions having been held in torrential rain, and Saturday's morning free practice session starting off damp, and only really drying out towards the end. And so for most teams, the first 20 minutes of the session were spent searching for some kind of dry weather set up, before they could even think about qualifying.

The session started much as expected, with Casey Stoner the first rider to crack into the 1'43s, but just 10 minutes into the session, the fast laps were flying thick and fast. Ben Spies, Sylvain Guintoli, Nicky Hayden, Jorge Lorenzo, Randy de Puniet and Toni Elias all held provisional pole at one point, as the times edged towards the mid-1'43 mark, and beyond. 

But with 20 minutes of the session gone, the really fast times started to shake out. Naturally, the first of the fastest was Casey Stoner, the Australian shaving nearly 3/10ths off Elias' time with a lap of 1'43.105, but he wasn't to be the only quick man. Just a couple of minutes later, Valentino Rossi took 8/100ths off Stoner's provisional pole, improving to 1'43.021.

Rossi wasn't finished there: his provisional pole was just the first in a sequence of fast laps, eventually taking pole down to 1'42.945. But Rossi wasn't the only rider capable of running fast on race tires. Nicky Hayden was running low 1'43s, smoking his rear tire in crowd-pleasing fashion through some of the long left handers, while Toni Elias was also getting quicker. So quick, in fact, that the Spaniard took his Alice Ducati to provisional pole with an impressive 1'42.741, 2/10ths quicker than Rossi's previous time.