MotoGP Review: Anyone's game

Bang!

That was what Valentino Rossi did to the MotoGP field at Le Mans.

He led the race at one point by nigh-on ten seconds, leaving the others scrapping over second place - only for the Jorge Lorenzo to fight through the field from ninth to take a FIAT Yamaha one-two! It was an incredible result.

Colin Edwards richly deserved his third place, but that just meant that Rossi had to buy him another beer on Sunday night because he kept the 'guy who was going to win the race', Dani Pedrosa, a place back in fourth. No one in the paddock saw that coming.

Valentino Rossi looks over his shoulder as he takes the checkered flag © DPPI

And whilst all this was going on, the worst thing possible happened to the reigning World Champion, Casey Stoner - his engine failed, leaving him to go home without anything at all.

Not scoring points for the first time in his Ducati career could not have happened at a worse time for the Aussie, coming right before Ducati's home race at Mugello in two weeks time, a race that means more to the team than any other race on the calendar. What a difference 12 months has made.

Le Mans was such a surprise that towards the end of the race I was trying to work out the points in the championship, but couldn't while I was commentating at the same time, so left it until the table was worked out for us on the data screens in the box.

And then it appeared - three points splitting three riders after five races. We may as well be starting from the beginning all over again, with a clean slate between Rossi, Lorenzo and Pedrosa.

The doom-mongers have been well and truly put back in their boxes since Qatar, where they were complaining about boring racing and the looming of another runaway championship.

Oh, ye of little faith! Remember back to 1997 and to the three riders from Repsol Honda winning every race, only for eight riders to win during the 2000 season? That is the kind of season we are having now; these are the good ol' days!

What this season may turn out to be is for it to be a repeat of 2006 where Nicky Hayden's consistency paid dividends as bad luck struck others.

Mind you, being a believer in things coming full circle, it may well be that Stoner seems to be getting the bad luck - not that he had good luck last year, as he just rode the wheels off the thing.

Pedrosa is keeping very quiet and getting ready to pounce once this pneumatic valve engine gets unleashed as a wildcard entry at Mugello; if it goes like hell, that's a wise move by HRC as they could just bolt the new engine into Pedrosa's bike overnight and let him qualify with it

Valentino Rossi on the 2000 Honda NSR500 © DPPI

But the main thing that has come full circle is Rossi and his fight. He fought like hell on the NSR 500, the first time he really had to take things seriously after larking about in 125 and 250.

Then he did it all again on the V5 before getting bored, so he moved to Yamaha and won nine races in the first year there and 11 victories the year after before it starting breaking and, he believed, it had the wrong tyres for a couple of years.

This year was another fresh start for Rossi after dumping Michelin last autumn for Bridgestones of Stoner and Ducati, and to be honest I did think that the dumping of Michelin was harsh and the uptake of Bridgestones to be a very steep hill to climb, with Michelin being angry and wanting to win, never mind a 2008 Yamaha with no Bridgestone data at all.

The Yamaha guys have changed the bike enormously with settings rather than parts, moving the weight to the rear of the bike and using all the grip that the Bridgestone gives.

With a light front end, Rossi has had to feel his way into riding a bike differently, but the wise engineering owl Jerry Burgess, along with with Masao Furusawa, Head of R & D at Yamaha, has cracked the others after just five rounds.

As always, one should never ever think anything else of Valentino less he will make it just happen. He is that talented, as he has demonstrated with 90 GP wins to his 29-year-old self. We really must appreciate what we have got at the moment.

Agostini, Nieto, Hailwood, Sheene, Roberts. He is above all but Ago in terms of victories, but he may well be above them as a character and a star. Arguable point, I know, but one that would keep many a discussion going late into the night.

And that's not just about the class of Rossi that we saw at Le Mans, but the class of the top four in the championship. We genuinely have no idea which one of those four is going to win at Mugello in ten days time, and that is what makes this sport so incredible to be a part of at the moment.

Can you imagine them all coming out of the Bucine final corner, inches apart, with a tailwind pushing them down the home straight at 210 mph in front of the best sports fans in the world? Un-be-lievable ...

And Rossi has not lost a four stroke race there since 2002.

Casey Stoner at speed in Le Mans © DPPI

Corners

Many riders turned a corner in Le Mans without realising it - Rossi because he dominated, Lorenzo because he genuinely had no idea he was going to get that second place, Pedrosa because he can finally see the pneumatic engine being shipped over to Europe and Stoner because he knows that the small front end change he made to the bike on Saturday afternoon may well be the turning point of the season for him.

Even though Stoner didn't score, he has to take solace in knowing that it wasn't his fault that he didn't score. He did the job, but the engine didn't.

"For some reason the bike didn't feel as it did during Saturday afternoon or warm up and we were losing about 0.5 to 0.8s," he said.

"We are back up to speed again and we are very positive. We have found our old feeling with the bike so we knew we were fast enough and now need to put everything together so we need to put this one behind us and look forward to the next one."

Last year the Mugello race was not one to remember for the team, but as Stoner pointed out, like Le Mans, they learnt what went wrong and immediately bounced back.

"Mugello wasn't the best for us last year because it was half wet, half dry and we didn't have the time to get the setting in," he said.

"But the week after that in Catalunya we managed to win because we found out what problem we had at Mugello. I hope we can go there this year with that extra experience and get rid of the problems we had last year.

"The characteristic of the bike in Portugal and China made it a little bit difficult to ride, so we went back to what we had at the beginning of the season with some old parts and some new parts and some parts we've already tested, and that definitely gave us back that feeling we wanted.

"I go to every race with the same mentality ..."

Stoner is not to be ruled out, no matter where he is in the championship. Ducati can fight back from its 41 point deficit. Remember, Rossi and Yamaha fought back from a 51 point deficit in 2006 after Laguna Seca to lead the title by eight points going into the last race just five races later ...

Jorge Lorenzo rests his legs © DPPI

Not in the script

Ramon Forcada, the crew chief for Lorenzo, said to me on Sunday evening that the weekend had been the hardest of his career. After Jorge's Chinese injuries and then the two crashes at Le Mans on Friday and Saturday, he thought that Sunday afternoon would be only for a handful of points.

Photos from the first corner of the race would suggest that, but in the end Jorge weighed up the risks and went for it.

He was 11th in the warm up and 13th into the first corner.

"I thought I would be lucky to finish sixth or seventh," he said.

"But I had two minds. One says to you this race is only to finish and nothing else, the other mind says you can try to stay with them. When I was on the grid, Javier Ulatte (Experienced mechanic from HRC. Team Pons and now FIAT Yamaha) said, 'the rivals of Portugal are the same' and this gave me some motivation.

"I started very bad, but then I felt more comfortable on the bike and then I finish second. It's a dream."

As someone who is studying being an actor and whom gains inspiration from films such as Gladiator, Lorenzo is beginning to write his own scripts.