BSB Donington: GSE Yams Tops on Chaotic Day

The GSE Yamaha riders shared the victories at Donington Park in the British Superbike Championship, but it was a day of controversy.

On the way to the grid for race one, HM Plant Honda's number 2 Aussie Josh Brookes crashed into Worx Suzuki star Sylvain Guintoli at the Melbourne Loop.  Guintoli, who has starred in BSB this year and was one of the title favourites, was carted off with a badly broken leg, both tibia and fibula being fractured. Brookes protested his innocence, claiming brake failure. However, analysis of the data showed that the brakes had not failed. While Guintoli had been trundling round to the grid, Brookes had been at virtually full race pace. He grabbed the brakes, then started to pump them, then hit the hapless Frenchman.

Clearly, Brookes made an honest mistake. He would not have pumped the brakes if he thought they were working properly. I'd imagine that the major speed difference between himself and Guinters tricked his senses into thinking he wasn't slowing down at all, along with the cold brakes giving poor feedback through the lever, so he tried to pump the brakes up and meanwhile torpedoed the Suzuki.

The stewards seem to have taken the view that it was Brookesy's fault, but an honest error, as they have given him a one race ban, suspended for three races. Interviewed on TV before the stewards' decision, the Aussie was gutted, revealing that a similar thing had happened to him while racing Down Under. It's just a shame that a relatively small error has led to Guintoli being out for a couple of months.

Race 1 saw Leon Camier on the GSE Airwaves Yamaha make a poor start, but fight through to a fairly straightforward victory. It was a great race, with loads of passing for position. In the end, Camier's team-mate James Ellison secured 2nd place, with young Scotsman Stuart Easton grabbing 3rd.

Race 2 wasn't so great for Camier. The lanky Englishman's bike conked out at the Melbourne Loop. He managed to restart pretty much dead last, and massacred the slower riders to finish 12th. His team-mate, ex-MotoGP rider James Ellison took his first BSB win, and it was a pretty dominant one, albeit with Camier and Guintoli out of the picture. This time, Easton took 2nd on the Hydrex Honda, with Chris Walker 3rd on the Rob Mac Yamaha.

Leon Camier now holds a big lead in the championship, with 117 points to Ellison's 89. The human giraffe looks a stick-on for the title, so long as he stays in one piece. The only question is whether he'll stay in BSB next year or bag a decent WSBK ride!

All in all it was a great day's racing, but overshadowed by Guintoli's injury. Get well soon, Sylvain.

Marco Melandri - What a Hero!

The MotoGP visit to Le Mans was wet as usual, and it produced a really interesting race. Cocky Spaniard Jorge Lorenzo won magnificently, staying out on wet tyres until the last possible moment before switching to slicks, and destroying the field in the process. However, the most amazing performance was from Marco Melandri, finishing 2nd on the Hayate Kawasaki.

Last year, Marco seemed to be finished. He just couldn't ride the Ducati. Whereas Casey Stoner chucks the Bologna Bullet into corners and wrestles it out of them, Marco was as terrified as a trainee tiger tamer in his first public performance. The hapless Italian would trundle round in last place, looking like an idiot.

But this year, Marco is back. The nutter who came around the last corner at Phillip Island, with one hand on the bars, smoking up the rear tyre on his way to victory, is back in the paddock. And he's riding the wheels off that awful black-painted Green Machine. Maybe it's fortunate that John Hopkins was fired by Kawasaki, he was terrible on that bike last year and would probably look like a complete monkey next to Melandri this year.

Marco took a thoroughly deserved second position at Le Mans. It was not caused by dozens of people crashing in front of him, it was sheer speed and talent in the impossibly slippy conditions. Even Valentino Rossi panicked, stopped too early for dry tyres, and fell off after about 3 corners on slicks. But he jumped back on the bike, did about 30 more pit stops, and finished the race. Only Kallio managed to rack up a DNF, and only Lorenzo managed to finish in front of Melandri.

It's great to have you back, Marco.

WSBK Kyalami: Nori Back to the Boil

The first visit for several years to the South African track of Kyalami was a bit of a subdued affair for the World Superbike Championship. The popular Frenchman Regis Laconi had an enormous crash in practise, breaking his neck and sustaining a heavy blow to the head. He spent a while in a medically induced coma, but is now awake, and will undergo an operation to have his neck bolted back together before returning to France. The outlook seems to be very positive, so get well soon Regis.

The racing wasn't up to much, really. The track is nice and wide, with lots of elevation changes (it's thousands of feet above sea level, so there's plenty of vertical room), but for some reason the field strung out and it seemed difficult to make overtaking moves. Possibly this is because few people had good quality data about the track. There was an official test at Kyalami before the season, but a lot of the bikes were fresh from the crates and very undeveloped back then.

Nitro Nori Haga won the double, despite still suffering from his bizarre bird-strike incident at Monza last week. Obviously Nori is made of sterner stuff than Sete Gibernau (the GP star having re-re-re-re-rebroken his collarbone again.)

Michel Fabrizio was again on the pace of his older, crazier and better team-mate. Strange. Fabrizio rarely strings two good results together. Has his first jammy victory finally unleashed a torrent of talent? Doubtful! Either way, it'll be interesting to find out. The young Roman jazzed up race 2 by passing Haga twice on the last lap, running wide both times. A very good showing.

Ben Spies had a weekend that started brilliantly and went downhill all the way. First of all, he took pole position by just one millisecond from Fabrizio, equalling the best ever run of 6 pole positions in a row by Doug Polen. In race 1 he could just about hang onto the leading Ducati duo, but in race 2 his gear lever fell off, giving him a DNF. Spies is still by far the best of the rest, but Haga's most unHagalike display of consistency is giving the Japanese nutcase a Baylisstic lead in the championship.

Johnny Rea gets an honourable mention for popping onto the podium in race 2, beating Haslam and Biaggi in the process. Haslam also gets an honourable mention for narrowly missing the podium in race 2, having crashed in qualifying and race 1.

So there wasn't amazing racing at the South African track, but the main thing to take away is that Regis Laconi appears to be making a swift recovery from his life-threatening injuries. Hopefully we'll be seeing the puddock back in the paddock before too long. 

WSBK: Carnage and Chaos at Monza

The World Superbike races at Monza resulted in a lucky win for Michel "Lanzi" Fabrizio, and a fully deserved win for Ben Spies. However, the day was marred with a chaotic start to the first race.

The trouble with Monza is the first chicane. Some people describe it as dodgy, or a bit too tight, or just plain crap. There has been more than one attempt at remodelling the corner, which used to be simply a kink in a 200mph straight and was therefore a tad dangerous. Some kind of chicane is necessary, but the present one is atrocious. This isn't MotoGP, there are close to 3 dozen bikes on a World Superbike grid, and some of the guys at the back aren't blessed with large amounts of talent or brainpower. The field arrives at the first corner jostling for position, and it just takes one idiot at the back to make a small mistake for carnage to ensue.

That's what happened. There were actually two crashes going on, but the most serious happened when the once-talented Makoto Tamada somehow tangled with Brendan Roberts. The Aussie ended up off the track, and his bike torpedoed the hapless Max Neukirchner, whose only crime was to be leading the race around the chicane. The flying Ducati hit him broadside on, breaking his femur. It's a disaster to have such a quick and popular racer out of action for many weeks, just because of moronic circuit design. A second crash involved bikes bursting into flames. This led to a long delay while the Italian marshalls scrubbed away at the oil and petrol stains on this slow, dodgy corner.

The race was restarted, and everyone managed to get around the first chicane without any major assaults. It turned into the classic Monza slipstreaming battle. The top three were the Sterilgarda Yamaha of Ben Spies and the two Xerox Ducatis of Noriyuki Haga and Michel "It's his passport, stupid" Fabrizio. Amazingly, the underperforming Roman was beating up his championship-leading Japanese team-mate, trying for an unlikely home victory. However, it was the Yamaha Italia bike of Ben Spies that led into the Parabolica for the last time. Then conked out half way round after running out of fuel. Some claimed it was because the Yamaha Italia team forgot to refill the bikes after the aborted start, which seems pretty unlikely. More likely, on a bike with such a lot of trick electronics, is that there was a miscalculation and the fuel load was simply cut too fine. Spies trundled over the line in 15th, immediately parking the Yamaha against the barrier.

This let Fabrizio take his maiden WSBK victory on home soil. The melodramatic Italian was overjoyed, and will probably have signed a 2-year extension to his Ducati contract already, having joined the Lorenzo Lanzi club of riders who got a top factory Ducati ride because of their passports and actually managed to win a race too. Nori Haga was second home, almost touching his team-mate on the run to the line. Max Biaggi (Aprilia) was briefly third, but was pinged for short-cutting a chicane and had 20 seconds added to his race time. This promoted Ryuichi Kiyonari (Ten Kate Honda) to the podium. He wasn't that happy, as he had made an awful start and been forced to fight all the way back up to where he should have been anyway.

Race Two was thankfully less insane, with none of the big names carted off with major injuries. However, there was one of the major names carted off with bumps and bruises. Noriyuki Haga dropped way down on the first lap, finally lobbing the Ducati at the tyre wall in a spectacular display of tumbling. His excuse was that a bird hit him on the right arm, and he didn't have a great deal of control over the bike. Being Japanese, he rode as fast as he could anyway, and fell off. Back to the old Haga? Not so long as birds stop hitting him on the arm. (A crash-happy bike racer with a bird on his arm? There must be a Carlos Checa joke in there somewhere.)

Spies managed to win the race this time, his bike lasting all the way to the chequered flag instead of dying a death 100 yards short. Fabrizio took 2nd, with Kiyo 3rd.

Max Biaggi set the speed record for the day, the whippet-like Roman Emperor wringing 202.4mph out of his Aprilia RSV4. Not bad for a tarted-up road bike, even though cynics call the Aprilia roadbike a race bike with lights and a speedo.

Overall it was a great day's racing that made you feel sorry for the poor saps watching F1 on another channel. Bad news for Max Neukirchner, but he'll bounce back. The DNF for Haga, and the, uh, JBF (Just Barely Finished) for Spies kept the title race interesting, and Fabrizio's lucky win added a 3rd name to this year's roll of honour. World Superbike keeps on rocking, next stop South Africa.

BSB Oulton: Camier Cruises to Double Victory

Oulton Park is a fine racetrack. As the name suggests, it is set in parkland, surrounded by forests and a lake. The tarmac twists and turns upwards and downwards, with so many blind corners that a guide dog would come in handy. Leon Camier stamped his authority all over the championship by taking both the wins in the British Superbike meeting.

Camier started from the front, having snatched pole position in the dying seconds of the qualifying session. The tall, laconic Englishman didn't make good starts, but was typically unflappable as he picked off his rivals, even surviving a scare on the grid for race two when an official claimed to have spotted fluid leaking from his Airwaves And Thanks To GSE Group And Jewson For Getting Me Here Yamaha (I think that's what he calls it).

The bike is still running with a tarted up road bike engine, with the full-on WSBK spec motor not appearing until team-boss Colin Wright takes an oxy-acetylene torch to the padlock on the GSE chequebook, probably when they reach a fast, non-twisty track where the extra 15 to 20 horse will be direly needed. You certainly wouldn't want to be going down the back straight at Snetterton 20 horse down on your rivals.

The fact that the youngster dominated the race meeting on a wheezing bike, despite being one of the biggest riders out there (either 6'2" or 6'3" depending on who you listen to, with about a foot of that being taken up by his giraffe-like neck) shows just how well he is riding. I had thought he would take a while to get back into the 4-cylinder groove after a year on V-twin Ducatis, but I was wrong about that. The new Yamaha R1's "bag of spanners" firing order gives it the best of both worlds, and it seems to suit Leon perfectly. I had picked Glen Richards for the title, and although the Aussie's consistency should help towards the end of the season, Camier is now looking like the favourite as he racks up the points early on.

Small Scotsman Stuart Easton took the lead early on in both races like some kind of mildly-overgrown Dani Pedrosa, but dropped down to fourth in the first race, and retired with electrical gremlins in race two. The Borders boy is certainly paying back the support of his fans, who have long claimed that he could do great things on a great bike.

His Hydrex Honda team-mate, Karl "Bomber" Harris had a better day. The Yorkshire bruiser had his personal trainer on the grid, presumably to stop him lying down and snaffling chocolate cakes before the races. It seemed to do the trick. Karl had horrible luck this time last year, but stayed on the bike and raced hard to climb onto the second step of the podium in both races. It was also a great result for Hydrex Honda, who have really rubbed the formerly factory HM Plant Honda team's nose in it.

Popular Frenchman Sylvain Guintoli was hugely impressive on his first race visit to Oulton, taking his Worx Suzuki to a pair of third places. Everyone agrees that this is a difficult track to learn, and nothing remotely like the MotoGP tracks that Sylvain is used to. Add to that the fact that the Suzuki is generally considered to shine on high speed tracks, and you have an excellent start to the season. Guintoli even came out with a bizarre story, claiming that he knew he would do well because he dreamed that his team boss Jack Valentine came down his chimney dressed as a blue Santa Claus, and handed him a trophy. Presumably, being French, Sylvain had been eating cheese before bedtime that day.

Other riders who stood out include Simon Andrews, who raced his Kawasaki brilliantly in the early stages of both races, despite being injured, before crashing in one and dropping down the field in the second.

Young Aussie Jason O'Halloran also punched above his weight on the SMT Honda, particularly in race one.

Gary Mason won the Cup class as usual on his Quay Garage Honda, embarrassing some of the riders from vastly richer teams.

Overall, it was a great day's racing, with the conditions staying pretty dry for the Superbikes. Camier looks like the favourite for the title, but it's a long way to the end of the season, and he knows better than most how badly things can go wrong mid-season. Still, the race for the title is already fascinating.

MotoGP Jerez: Rossi Rules

Valentino Rossi returned to form with victory at the Jerez round of the MotoGP championship. It was Repsol Honda's miniature matador Dani Pedrosa who led for the first half of the race, while Rossi tangled with Casey Stoner for 2nd place. Once he had dispatched the Aussie, The Doctor hunted down his tiny rival and won the race convincingly.

It was all smiles on the podium, which is incredible when you consider that Pedrosa (2nd) and Stoner (3rd) were up there. However, Dani was relieved to be going so damn quickly with his still-healing injuries, and Stoner was just amazed that he managed to wrestle his Ducati round the track and take a podium. The Bologna Bullet is ill-suited to Jerez, as it doesn't go around corners very well and prefers long straights.

Rossi even celebrated the win with a replay of one of his classic victory gags: parking his bike against a barrier and nipping into a trackside toilet.

The fourth of the usual suspects, Jorge Lorenzo, had taken a blistering pole position, but was left muttering excuses after racing slowly and falling off while challenging Stoner for 3rd. It was a severely bad day for the only rider who would make you write to Roget's and demand that their thesaurus be updated with more synonyms for "cocky".

Promoted to 4th by Jorge's hop-off was, incredibly, Randy de Puniet. The Frenchman, who is best known for leaving piles of gravel when he takes his boots off in the pit garage, was brilliant as he took the coveted "next Honda home after Pedrosa" spot on his reasonably awful privateer bike. Maybe the Playboy bunnies provided by his Playboy LCR Honda sponsors helped.

Next home was another incredible ride from Marco Melandri on the Hayate Kawasaki. Two of the worst bikes on the grid finishing 4th and 5th, with only one person crashing in front of them. Marco lived up to his nickname, "Macho", by battling all race long with Capirossi and Edwards.

Compared to the heroics of the Randy and Marco show, everyone behind them looked pretty rubbish. Worst of all was Nicky Hayden, who has confirmed that the second factory Ducati bike is cursed by finishing about a year behind his team-mate. Only Stoner can ride that bike. Mika Kallio's pretty good on the privateer version, though.

It was a crushing display of dominance from Rossi to win the race, with Pedrosa and Stoner punching well above their weight (presumably flyweight or bantamweight or something), having no right to lap as quickly as they did. A half-decent race for MotoGP, with some heroics thrown in. Here's hoping this season keeps going in the right direction.