Nicky Hayden

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.

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 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.

It was actually even possible, the atmosphere in the Repsol Honda team continues to decline. At the pre-race press conference, Nicky Hayden was asked about the comments Alberto Puig had made in an interview with MotoGP.com, in which Puig claimed that Hayden couldn't set up a bike and was upset about the wall down the garage because it prevented the American from seeing Dani Pedrosa's data.

Hayden responded that he didn't "want to go back into having a cat and fight with words, back and forth with this guy and defend everything he said." But he stood by his assertion that Puig basically ran the HRC team. "I'm not even sure what I said once it got translated. I think I said something just about the fact that Puig basically runs our team, runs HRC at the moment. I really believe that. I do think Yamano has done a great job as a team manager. That guy is in a tough, tough spot! I know he's got a lot of heat coming at him from all directions, so that's basically what I said. I need to quit being a hypocrite, I guess!"

But the Kentuckian did make his anger clear at Puig's assertions about Hayden's dislike of the wall, and the lack of data sharing. "That wall I couldn't care less about. It doesn't even faze me one little bit," Hayden said on the subject of the wall. But it was Puig's claims about data sharing that were the focus of most of Hayden's wrath: "Some of the stuff he says is a joke about sharing data and that's why I'm mad. I haven't seen his data for a long time. The truth is he sees everybody's data, so lets be clear about that. If it's me going fastest or Dovizioso going fastest, he sees everything."

It was universally acknowledged that you were unlikely to find a happy, family atmosphere in the Repsol Honda garage. But just how bad things were is only now starting to appear, as the end of a long and unhappy marriage looms at the end of three years. For now, the partners involved are starting to speak out.

Nicky Hayden has been the most reticent of the two sides of the garage so far, refusing to criticize Honda for their treatment of him since he won them their last world title. But in a recent interview with the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais, Hayden spoke out about what he believed was a fundamental flaw in the Repsol Honda setup.

Hayden felt that the team wasn't functioning as a team, with each side of the garage functioning independently and not sharing data to help develop the bike. "I don't like the fact that there's a wall separating the garages and that we're not sharing information," he told El Pais. "We're both on the same team, and we should be working together."

The problem, Hayden said, was not Pedrosa, but his manager. "[Alberto] Puig has too much influence on the team. In theory, he works for Dani, not Honda, but ..." he told El Pais.  When asked how much credit Pedrosa still has with Honda, Hayden replied "Dani is great rider, with a lot of talent. But Puig is the guy with all the power at Honda, not Dani. Unfortunately, it's Puig who runs Honda. I know I'm not supposed to say so, but that's the truth."

It seems that Alberto Puig was not at all pleased after this interview appeared in the Spanish press. For today, Puig has struck back in an interview with the official MotoGP.com website, blasting Hayden with some damning comments. When asked about Hayden's objections to the wall dividing the garages, Puig told MotoGP.com "all I can say is that Hayden may be bothered because now he can't access information and telemetry data from Dani's bike. With this information he was able to improve his riding, as he had all of Dani's references and now he can't use that any longer. He was simply copying as he never knew how to set-up a bike." 

A crucial meeting is due to be held at Motegi on Saturday afternoon. During this meeting of the Grand Prix Commission, a proposal is to be submitted to allow only a single manufacturer to produced tires for MotoGP. Bridgestone is the favorite to be awarded the contract, which would end nearly 60 years of open competition in motorcycle racing's premier class. The general expectation is that the proposal will be adopted without too much argument.

Or at least, that was the general expectation up until a few hours ago. Now, Spanish television is reporting that Ducati, the team that has taken Bridgestone to its dominant position in the MotoGP paddock, is in talks with Michelin to supply tires to all 5 Ducatis expected to be on the grid for next year. The deal, if it were to come off, would immediately scupper any chances of a single tire proposal being pushed through, and blow the tire war wide open again.

At first glance, the proposal may seem to be beyond bizarre: Why would a company who have built up such an incredible record of success with Bridgestone suddenly dump the tire company who helped them to win world title this year, and whose tires are certain to win the championship again in 2008? What's more, why drop what is considered to be one of the key ingredients in the magic recipe that has turned Casey Stoner from being a fast kid with a tendency to crash to arguably the most dominant rider in MotoGP?

by Scott Jones

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