Sepang, Malaysia

The schedule for the official tests has been announced. The MotoGP and smaller classes will test separately. Highlight of the test season is as ever the official IRTA test at Jerez, also known as Grand Prix Zero. Here, a BMW coupe will be up for grabs during a special qualifying session held on the last day.

MotoGP

125 and 250 class

With the new tire regulations comes a severely reduced MotoGP testing schedule. Here's the testing schedule as it stands:

More details when they become available.

The FIM announced a minor change to the 2009 MotoGP calendar today. The Misano round of MotoGP will be held a week earlier than previously scheduled, moving it to the week after the Indianapolis MotoGP round.

* Evening race
** Saturday race
*** Only MotoGP class

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.

With the decision by KTM to withdraw from the 250cc class in 2009 - a decision taken in response to the proposed rule changes which would see the class becoming a 600cc four-stroke series - and the global financial turmoil causing a host of sponsors to pull out, the future of the 250 class is looking increasingly in doubt.

The combination of KTM and Polaris World pulling out took 4 bikes off the grid, immediately decimating numbers. And with other teams and sponsors as yet unsigned, at the moment, the class looks like falling well short of the minimum number of 15 bikes needed to run the class. If Dorna does not receive entries for 15 bikes, then FIM rules prevent the series from being called a world championship, which in turn would make the series an irrelevance in global terms.

At the moment, there are between 10 and 12 bikes certain to be on the grid. That does not mean that more will not appear, however. The makeup of the smaller classes is notoriously unpredictable, with entries being added well after the end of the previous season. And the list of likely participants is still missing a few possible names, such as Campetella, Caffe Latte, Blusens and Yamaha Indonesia, so there is no immediate reason to panic. But even if a few more teams do field bikes, it could leave the grid looking worryingly thin.

Part of the 250 classes problems are down to money, victims, like many other sports, of the current financial crisis. Polaris World, who sponsor the team fielding Mattia Pasini, are a Spanish-based construction company building second homes and luxury golf resorts around the Mediterranean. The company had originally weathered the storms ravaging the Spanish housing sector rather well. Though domestic Spanish housing prices were caught in a hyperinflated bubble, prices for second homes had been holding up reasonably well. But once the financial crisis hit worldwide, luxury purchases such as apartments at golf resorts were among the first purchases to be dropped, hitting the firm badly.

Polaris World's difficulties highlight the MotoGP's underlying problems. The series is still based very strongly in Spain and Italy, and consequently, economic circumstances there dictate the health of the series to an exaggerated degree. More and more broadly-based sponsorship is required to help carry the series through difficult financial times.

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.