Submitted by Kropotkin on Mon, 2008-06-23 17:35.
Interviewed on the grid at Valencia, before the start of the final race of 2006, where the championship seemed to have slipped out of his hands, Nicky Hayden said "This is MotoGP, anything can happen. That's why we line up." Every race weekend, countless factors can influence the possible outcome of a race: The weather can turn from dry to wet, or vice versa; a seemingly innocent crash during practice can injure hands, wrists or feet, suddenly making riding a bike a lot more difficult; settings which worked at the previous race can turn out to be useless at the track at hand; or perhaps even a fault with a rider's number 1 bike can leave the riding around uncomfortably on their spare machine, which though ostensibly identical, still feels just that little bit different.
This weekend at Donington was a case in point. The English weather had done its very best to turn proceedings on their head by being dry on Friday, then soaking wet on Saturday. Sunday started dry again, the rain having made way for a fierce wind gusting nastily at some of the crests around the track. Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo had turned up still hurting from pre- and post-race crashes at Catalunya, and were circulating well down the order. And American Superbike champion Ben Spies had flown in to ride the injured Loris Capirossi's Suzuki, and impressed the sceptical European fans by qualifying 8th on the grid in a downpour.
Spies' World Superbike counterpart could have done with a good deal less of that unpredictability. Almost from the moment James Toseland rolled up at his home Grand Prix, things just kept on going awry. First, the settings he had found at the post-race test at Catalunya turned out not to work at all at Donington, meaning he was constantly in the bottom half of the field. Then, in an effort to get a decent grid position, he crashed twice in one lap in the dying minutes of qualifying, leaving him stranded down in 16th place. This certainly wasn't part of the plan, and Toseland was left wishing that things would work out as he had imagined them before the event, instead of spinning wildly out of control.
Same Ol' Same Ol'
Some things, though, are as predictable as the motions of the heavens. Once Casey Stoner headed the timesheets within minutes of the first free practice session starting, then repeated the feat during every session, only bested in the dying minutes of a rain-drenched FP3, a palpable sense of fate overtook the paddock. The improvements that Stoner had found at the test after Barcelona left the World Champion looking exactly like the rider who crushed the opposition in 2007. We'd seen this version of Casey Stoner before: arrive at the track and be fastest from Friday morning to Sunday afternoon.
Fortunately, a couple more extremely predictable things happened, which prevented the outcome from being a foregone conclusion. The first was that once again, a Yamaha made it onto the front row of the grid, as they have done so often this year. And this time, it was Valentino Rossi who had qualified next to Casey Stoner, raising the possibility that this could be a dogfight rather than a runaway.
The second thing that we all just knew would happen was that the other Australians on the grid thrived in the wet conditions. Ant West, so far this year positively glued to the back of the grid, qualified 7th in the rain, and was unlucky at that after discovering he didn't have a softer rain tire for the end of the qualifying practice. And Chris Vermeulen did even better, qualifying in 3rd and on the front row of the grid in the wet. It remains a paradox that motorcycle racers from the world's driest inhabited continent are so incredibly quick once the rain begins to fall. You could almost suspect them of trying to get it all over with as quickly as possible so they can get back into their nice, dry pit garages.
Vermeulen and West would not have the elements on their side on race day, as the rain was long gone by the time the bikes rolled up to the starting line for the race. If the Suzuki rider and the Kawasaki man were to run at the front, they'd have to try a different tack. The two Australians would have to find a way to surprise the rest of the field.
Since the announcement in July that Formula One would be coming to Donington Park in 2010, MotoGP fans have been waiting for details regarding exactly how this will change the track as a motorcycle racing venue. Plans for the Hermann Tilke re-design are now available on the 
