Ducati

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.

Testing after the final round of World Superbikes at Portimao threw up a few interesting surprises. The first is that Shane Byrne was quick right off the bat, but as Shakey won the British Superbike championship aboard a very similar bike this year, he might be regarded as having a head start. The second surprise was that Ben Spies was so fast. Spies has changed bikes and tires, and so setting such a fast time after just two days of testing is fairly impressive.

Perhaps the most interesting time was the one set by Max Biaggi aboard the Aprilia. The RSV4 is a brand new bike, and the difference between the drawing board and the track can be monumental, as so many factories have found to their peril. So far, it looks like Aprilia have got it right.

The next round of testing for the World Superbike riders is to take place at Kyalami, South Africa, from 10th to the 12th of December. 

1. Shane Byrne (Ducati) 1'43.6

2. Ben Spies (Yamaha) 1'43.9

3. Max Biaggi (Aprilia) 1'44.1

4. Tom Sykes (Yamaha) 1'44.5

5. Katsuyuki Nakasuga (Yamaha) 1'44.5

6. Alex Polita (Ducati) 1'44.6

7. Leon Haslam (Honda) 1'44.6

8. Roberto Rolfo (Honda) 1'45.0

9. Regis Laconi (Honda) 1'45.4

10. Lorenzo Lanzi (Honda) 1'46.3

Fastest lap during the race:  Troy Bayliss - 1'43.787

Some of the World Superbike paddock got to head straight off on vacation - at least once their hangovers from the end of season party subsided. But for a few hardy souls, and a bunch of series rookies, work started on Monday, after the annual journalist blagfest which sees writers from selected magazines - some former racers, some just very lucky and very scared - ride the world's trickest production bikes around the spectacular Portimao track.

The busiest part of pit lane is outside the Aprilia garage, where people are crowded round the newest entrant to the World Superbike paddock. The bike has has one or two teething troubles, occasionally refusing to start, but since getting underway, Max Biaggi has been lapping at speed.

The other easy-to-spot garage in the otherwise quiet pit lane is the Yamaha Motor Italia box, where rookies Ben Spies and Tom Sykes are making their debut aboard the Yamaha R1. The interest in the Yamaha pits is twofold: On the one hand, there's the biggest name American to join a World Championship since Nicky Hayden went to Repsol Honda, and a promising and very talented young British rider at his side. On the other, there's the brand new, long bang, cross-plane crankshaft R1, currently decked out in skunkworks-style black carbon fiber, and looking like it's been rolled freshly out of Yamaha's Racing Department workshops.

There's plenty of other new faces here, too. Shakey Byrne is circulating on the Sterilgarda Ducati and is looking what the Brits are calling "proper fast". Eugene Laverty has taken over the seat vacated by the tragic death of Craig Jones, and kept warm by double AMA Formula Extreme champion Josh Hayes, and is learning his way around the bike and the circuit. 

Another newcomer is the Australian Ant West. West has left a disastrous season aboard a disastrous Kawasaki MotoGP bike behind him and is circulating on the Stiggy Motorsports Honda Supersport bike.

You need to find a corner piece to start

Clean room

E?

What is it about Australians on Ducatis? The Superstock 1000 FIM Cup race was won this morning by Brendan Roberts, who also clinched the championship with the win.  The Australian, who rides for the Xerox Ducati Junior team, kept his head whilst others were falling about him. The race was led early on by Chris Seaton aboard the Celani Suzuki, but Roberts closed his countryman down, passing him on lap 9 and never relinquishing the lead again.

Roberts had had to contend with Xavier Simeon early on, but the Belgian Alstare Suzuki rider, who was leading the series going into the race at Portimao, crashed on lap 8, and rejoined to finish 11th. Maxime Berger, the Hannspree IDS Ten Kate Honda rider, completed the podium.

Berger finished 2nd in the championship to Roberts, with Alessandro Polita in 3rd.

The day has started well for Australia and for Ducati. Chances of it continuing are very, very good. 

MotoGPMatters.com is in Portimao this weekend, to cover the World Superbikes finale, but mostly, to seize the last chance of seeing Troy Bayliss out on track. This morning, we headed out to find the circuit and give it the once over, and we have to say that it's an impressive facility. 

 

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 news that Sete Gibernau would be making a return to MotoGP aboard a Ducati run by the Onde 2000 team has been so long in coming that it barely figures as news at all. Gibernau's return had been mooted as early as June, after the Spaniard started testing the Ducati at Mugello. That news triggered a wave of speculation that Gibernau could make an early return to the series, with rumors that Marco Melandri was being retained on a race-by-race basis.

That switch never materialized. Many explanations were posited: Ducati were afraid that if they let Melandri go, he'd do better on a Kawasaki than he did on the Ducati, possibly even beating Gibernau; Gibernau's times, though good, were not good enough to take the risk; or that the Spaniard had simply made too many demands in terms of salary, and a guarantee of a contract for the factory ride in 2009. The official announcement that Nicky Hayden would be joining Casey Stoner at Ducati for 2009 finally killed any remaining speculation about Gibernau's return to the factory Marlboro Ducati squad.

But by then, most of the details of Gibernau's new project had been finalized. And on Thursday night, the Onde 2000 team, currently active in the 125 class, presented their MotoGP program for 2009. To the surprise of nobody, Sete Gibernau was introduced as the rider, while Pablo Nieto, the 26 year-old 125 racer who announced his retirement from racing at the end of the season at Sepang, will take on a management role alongside his brother, Gelete.

The team was expected to be sponsored by Onde 2000, a Spanish construction company owned by Fernando "Paco El Pocero" Hernandez. But at the team introduction, the team was introduced as the Grupo Fernando Hernandez Onde 2000 Guinea Ecuatorial team. Which suggests that Fernando Hernandez is putting his own money into the project, rather than funding it through Onde 2000. This is hardly a surprising step, as the Spanish construction industry, once one of the main pillars of the Spanish economy, is in a tailspin, suffering from both the implosion caused by the financial crisis, and the collapse of the Spanish housing bubble, which had grown to almost Herculean proportions over the past 10 years.

The question is, why did Gibernau come back? The Spaniard was widely believed to be mentally broken by Valentino Rossi during the 2005 season, Gibernau never winning another race after being bumped off track on the final lap of the Jerez season opener. Then, a string of injuries during 2006, aggravating a collar bone injury suffered previously, prompted Gibernau to retire.

One of the last pieces of the 2009 MotoGP puzzle has just fallen into place. The satellite Ducati team have just announced that Mika Kallio and Niccolo Canepa will be competing for the team next year.

The move is no real surprise, as rumors had been around that Kallio and Canepa would be joining the team for over a month. And it also underlines the role Ducati sees for the satellite team run by Paolo Campinoti. The Pramac team is very much the Ducati junior team, a place where up and coming riders can be groomed and tested.

Both Kallio and Canepa are interesting prospects. Kallio was twice runner up in the 125cc championship, his chances of a title in 2005 controversially ruined when he was beaten over the line by his team mate Gabor Talmasci in Qatar. Now in his 2nd season in the 250 series, he has looked like a title contender ever since moving up. The Fin is a promising talent.

His team mate is another interesting prospect. Niccolo Canepa was the 2007 FIM Superstock champion, aboard the brand new Ducati 1098. He so impressed Ducati's technicians that the Italian was hired to work as their main test rider for 2008, helping to develop both Ducati's GP8 and GP9 Desmosedici MotoGP bikes, as well as the 1098R which carried Troy Bayliss to his 3rd World Superbike title. Canepa's times at Mugello have been very impressive, the only man on a Ducati capable of getting within shouting distance of Casey Stoner's times there.

Another item of note in the press release is that the team, currently racing under the Alice Ducati name, refers to itself only as Pramac Racing. There has been talk that Alice, the Italian-based telecom provider, could reduce its sponsorship of Ducati's race program, and this press release would seem to confirm that suspicion. The financial crisis has bitten deeply in all aspects of life this fall, and now it's starting to sink its teeth into motorcycle racing. Let's hope it loses its appetite soon.

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.

The first day at Sepang was a strange affair, with weather playing a major role, as expected. Though the expected thunderstorms didn't roll in while the bikes were on track, conditions were hot and humid, and a light drizzle blighted the afternoon session for 20 minutes or so.

Valentino Rossi set the mark in the morning, the only man to post a time in the 2'02 bracket in the dying moments of the session, but in the afternoon, it was clearly contract time. Shinya Nakano dominated the session almost from the off, quickly setting the fastest time, a low 2'03, and once the drizzle started 20 minutes in, his time went unchallenged.

Most of the grid spent much of the next 20 minutes in their garages, venturing out only sporadically, with only the truly desperate putting in a lot of laps. The light drizzle meant that any data gathered would be of little use in either the dry or the wet, as times were several seconds off the pace, but there was not enough water on the track to break out even intermediate tires.

Once the rain stopped, and the track dried out, the garages emptied their riders onto the track in a rush to the end of the session. Everyone was out on track, people only popping briefly back into the pits for a new tire and a quick conference with their pit crew. And everyone was drastically improving their time.

It was a testament to Nakano's first fast lap that his time stood for so long. He was the only man to beat his own time until the last minute of the session, when Valentino Rossi came flying past, followed shortly by Casey Stoner. But even Stoner's time would not last, as it was Colin Edwards who ended up with the fastest time, putting in a seriously fast time on his final lap.

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

For those just awakening from time under a rock, the leakiest secret of the season was released to the world today...