MotoGP: More Qatar Analysis

There's a good, and lengthy, post from Matthew "Birty" Birt on the Qatar MotoGP race. (It's worth setting aside a good 10 minutes to chew it over).
He agrees with some of the opinions that I had given, and has a load of background information too. On the subject of Ducati's enormous straight-line speed advantage over Yamaha, Birty says "I bet Valentino felt like he'd taken a chopstick to a gunfight."
Nice!
It's also worth mentioning one of the issues he raises, that John Hopkins had an amazing race, despite being badly beaten up by an enormous highside in testing. It was a great performance from the hard-as-nails Anglo-American. He admitted in a post-race interview that he barely made it through turn 1 after taking the chequered flag, due to the pain in his wrist. That's the kind of racer we need in MotoGP, here's hoping he recovers soon.