MotoGP 2008 Discussion Thread

The first round of the MotoGP championship has just ended in Qatar. Awesome racing in 250 especially.

Damn night race means it's early in the morning for viewers in Asia - I guess MotoGP is happy to have beat F1 to their first night race .

125:

1. Sergio Gadea
2. Joan Olive
3. Stefan Bradl

Pole position man Bradley Smith had his steering damper fail. Early leader Talmacsi also had some problems. I fell asleep at some point and woke up with 2 laps to go so don't know if anything else exciting happened.

250:

1. Pasini
2. Barbera
3. Kallio

Great race which at first looked like it might be boring. Bautista was well ahead and then Barbera. The Bautista faded and later it turned into a 4-bike race for the win! Barbera again a bit crazy overtaking but no crashing this time . He did help Pasini monster into the lead though. Kallio was able to take Debon for 3rd. Going to be a good 250 season for sure.


MotoGP:

1. Stoner
2. Lorenzo
3. Pedrosa

Tech 3 Yamaha really impressed in Qual with 2nd and 3rd - as did rookie rider and Rossi teammate Lorenzo by taking pole. Melandri was 2sec off Stoner and Anthony West was also an embarrassing 2 seconds off Hopkins at Kawasaki.

Lorenzo on the Michelins held on quite well but Stoner was too strong, and Melandri was still nowhere. Rossi lost to his teammate and almost to the Tech 3 of Toseland as well.

Race started off really good and ended good with the battle for 4th. 1st-2nd-3rd was decided a fair few laps before the end though.

Rossi might run out of excuses if Lorenzo is still able to match him on the different tyres and Stoner is able to beat him on the same tyres.. expect Rossi to bounce back though.

7 time champ dont need to give excuse..

So far Rossi is saying the right things. Here are his comments after Qatar:

"I think we aren't ready yet and the set-up of our bike isn't optimal," the Italian told Italia1 television. "In the first laps we go well, but then the bike starts moving a lot. I think it's a set-up problem.

"We must forget all the settings we had over the past years and start over again to have the bike working differently. I'm really quick under braking, but I'm slow around the corners and I struggle.

"I think we'll need to set-up the bike in a completely different way, because these tyres have to be used in a very different way. But no more than a month ago we flew in Malaysia, we were really quick, and Stoner is up in front with the same tyres.

"So we must only understand the way to use them. We must do it quick, we need to be more reactive and quick, and most of all we must forget how we've used the bike up to now."

Hopefully the set up will improve for him. It's no fun watching runaway winners...

Sure is... getting back to work to get faster rather than complain about something.

more comments from Rossi

"We expected a difficult race here, but actually not as difficult as this!" said Rossi. "We haven't been fast here in Qatar since last week's night test but, despite this, I thought we might be able to fight for the podium. Tonight however it was really difficult and now we have to understand the reason for this result.

"After five or six laps I started doing 56.4 and 56.5 and from then on I couldn't improve on that pace until the end. I was very fast in braking, but not so fast in the corners. We know that we can make our Bridgestone tyres work better than this, because they are winning tyres and tonight they showed it once again.

"Throughout the winter, at all tracks, we were very fast and this is the only one where we were not. Now our task is to understand why this happened. We had a couple of ideas to try but in the end we decided to stick to what we know because we need some more time to understand how to improve and how to be faster. We know we can do better than this and so we just need to gather all the information and use it in the best way for the next race. Finally I want to say congratulations to Lorenzo for a great debut tonight; honestly I'm not surprised because I knew he was fast and talented, but he did very well tonight in a hard race so well done to him."

Source: GPupdate.com

“We were expecting a difficult race, because we were not so fast this weekend and also at last week’s test,” reviewed Rossi. “I hoped to finish on the podium, but it wasn’t possible because we had too many problems. I tried to stay with Pedrosa and keep ahead of Dovizioso, but it was too difficult.

“We have to understand why things turned out like this, but it looks like the Bridgestone tyres are ok, the Yamaha bike is fast and we just have to put it all together.”

“I want to say congratulations to Lorenzo for a great debut tonight; honestly I’m not surprised because I knew he was fast and talented, but he did very well tonight in a hard race so well done to him,” said the magnanimous Italian.

Source: MotoGP.com

Mr. Bridgestone man, you got to tell me the secrets to the tires..