Stoner crashes out… but Ducati will bounce back

“I’ll bet you anything you like that he never makes that mistake again! In one of my last columns – after Casey Stoner was immediately quicker than Valentino Rossi at a soaking-wet Malaysia – I made the point that Ducati’s number one rider seems to have a secret ‘On’ switch inside himself, which he can press into action, and get up to instant race speed faster than anyone else on the grid. Well, maybe he switched it on just fifty metres too early at Valencia on Sunday, when he whipped open the throttle during his warm-up lap whilst trying out a ‘practice start’, and sadly managed to fall off!

Stoner had a very good reason for trying that tactic out, in that, whilst the ambient temperature was quite warm, the race-track and tire temperatures were unusually cold, so he just wanted to make himself and his machine absolutely ready for a ‘banzai’ start. But he’d been by far the fastest rider all weekend long at Valencia, and might very probably have won the Grand Prix, even if he’d taken things easy…

Nicky Hayden’s fine fifth place finish brought some relief to Ducati that day, and the American ex-World Champion will now head into the winter break with the all the confidence of a man who has now conquered a difficult machine, whilst closing the gap on his super-fast team-mate during 2009 from an eternity to only just a few tenths of a second. Nicky’s ride was a signal to both his team and the outside-world, I believe, that he considers himself to be a contender for 2010.

The 2010 season, incidentally, will already have started by the time that you read this, as there were a precious few testing days booked in at Valencia for the period immediately following Sunday’s Moto GPs. With the number of close-season testing days now reduced to 11, all winter – in order to save on costs – these may well turn out to be crucially important; particularly to those manufacturers debuting their 2010 prototypes, here.

The small number of testing days this winter also means that the riders now have more time over the next six months – the 2010 season won’t start until mid-April – to do their own things, when it comes to building up their fitness, and preparing for a summer of battle ahead. That will be a different story in almost each individual case, with Dani Pedrosa hiking his way up mountains, for instance, other riders spending months on end going up and down hills on mountain-bikes…and some doing comparatively little, apart from relaxing and clearing their minds.

Psychological coaching, for instance, will be vitally important to some people feeling that they’re reaching their maximum potential, whilst others, more naturally self-confident characters like Valentino Rossi, just always seem to walk into the Paddock for every race, looking like they own it. Physical fitness and psychological self-confidence are often seen as being very closely related, and that’s why so many of the guys – Jorge Lorenzo and Casey Stoner, in particular – will be training themselves to Olympian levels of fitness, even though Moto GP races rarely last for longer than 45 minutes.

Incidentally, that training will mainly involve cardio and endurance work – for maximising every second of those 45 minutes – rather than lifting weights and adding muscle bulk. The muscles involved in riding a Moto GP bike – leaning it into corners, then lifting it back up again – are extremely specialised, and added muscle bulk would often prove both heavier and unhelpful. Lorenzo and Stoner both deceive the eyes by looking like a couple of very leanly-built guys, for instance.

Those two will both take starring roles, no doubt, in the 2010 season to come, along with the other, established members of the ‘Fantastic Four’; Valentino Rossi and ’09’s final race-winner, Dani Pedrosa. But the brilliant debut on Sunday of Ben Spies aboard the Yamaha makes me wonder whether next year might be even more exciting. And that’s even before we mention Dovizioso, aboard the second Honda, or the vastly-improved Nicky Hayden, on the number two Ducati.

And Valentino Rossi has ensured that we’ll have plenty to talk about over the winter to come with those juicy quotes he gave to the media, over the weekend. ‘The Doctor’ said that he couldn’t foresee a 2011 season in which he’d remain as Yamaha team-mate to Jorge Lorenzo, and that he wouldn’t mind rounding out his Moto GP career by racing for Ducati. There’s not much that you can teach Rossi, these days, about keeping the media people busy or the sport in the head-lines over these long winter months to come!”