Lorenzo celebrates "fabulous" victory

The Yamaha rider started the race from pole position, but fell back to fourth place by the first corner, behind Dani Pedrosa, Casey Stoner and Ben Spies.

However, after overtaking the latter pair and benefiting from Pedrosa's crash on lap 11, he was able to take his sixth win of the season and increase his World Championship lead to 72 points.

"Today was very tough," said the Spaniard, who didn't seem to mind that the Italian anthem was played for him on the podium before race organisers realised their mistake and then played his country's instead.

"Dani [Pedrosa] was having one of his good races, braking so late and so hard [everywhere] and pushing so much.

"I thought that if I could push as hard as him, maybe he would make a mistake, and he did. It was much easier after that.

"It was good after the bad start, because I fell to fourth and didn't really understand why, because I thought my start was good. It is a fabulous victory."