Crunch Time
From the blustery shores of Phillip Island, the MotoGP paddock have headed north into the tropics, swapping Australia’s chilly spring for Malaysia’s hot and humid northeast monsoon, packing away their quilted jackets and retrieving their lightest cotton shirts once again.
The contrast is not just in the climate, however. The two tracks could hardly be […]

The Exception And The Rule
There is an unspoken rule among motorcycle racers: you always ride, no matter what. Broken bones are shrugged off, bruises laughed at and only very severe injury is enough to keep riders off their bikes. There is one exception, and that is one honored more in the breach than in the […]

Making A Point
On the face of it, MotoGP is in trouble. There are just 17 bikes on the grid, the lowest number in recent memory; a factory has withdrawn due to financial problems, as has a satellite team; another team has had to swap riders mid-season to bring in someone with sufficient sponsorship to allow […]

History In The Making
There is a firmly ingrained belief in Europe that the United States, as a young country, has neither history nor any sense of it. The view back in the Old World is formed almost entirely - and almost entirely incorrectly - from Hollywood and the TV studios, of gleaming glass-fronted buildings, huge […]

One For The Team
Probably the best-known aphorism in motorcycle racing - or racing of any sort, for that matter - is that the first person you have to beat is your team mate. Your team mate, after all, is on exactly the same equipment with the same support, and so there are no excuses. If […]

All Change
MotoGP, like all things in life, has its seasons. As an outdoor activity taking place in the northern hemisphere, those seasons closely mirror the seasons of Europe: When the series starts racing in April, there’s the thrill and excitement of things new and full of boundless possibility. In July, as summer hits its peak, […]

Round The Left Hand Side
In every form of competition requiring a track, the participants travel around the track in a counter-clockwise direction, making a sequence of left turns. In track cycling, athletics, flat track, speedway, greyhound racing, horse racing, NASCAR and a host of other forms of racing, the competitors just keep turning left. There […]

Returning To The Scene Of The Crime
At heart, every motorcycle race starts fundamentally the same: A group of riders of similar talent on similar equipment line up on the grid with the intention of crossing the line ahead of their rivals at the end of the race. Yet despite its simplicity of concept, once the […]

21st Century Man
Assen Race Report - 21st Century Man
Numbers are funny things. On their own, they are meaningless, just abstract inventions, a way of keeping track, of measuring and quantifying objects. There is no intrinsic difference between the numbers 1, 4, 7, 12, 666 and 26017 other than their size. Yet stop someone on the […]

The Low Low Lands Of Holland
Ask someone to describe the landscape of Holland, and they won’t usually need more than a single word. "Flat" is the adjective most commonly used in relation to The Netherlands, as anyone who has ever made the trek from Amsterdam up to Assen will acknowledge. Heading southeast out of Amsterdam, […]