MotoGP Catalunya

Last time out, at Assen, Whore-hey Lorenzo took advantage of another Rossi-free race to completely gut the rest of the field, rack up his fifth win of the season, and extend his championship points lead to 47 points. Even though he backed his pace way down on the last lap, he still managed to cross the line roughly 6 seconds in front of 2nd place Pedrosa. Game over...flawless victory.

So then...here we are at Lorenzo's home race at Catalunya. With Rossi back home hibernating in a Hyperbaric chamber and Lorenzo on the tail-end of a 3-win streak, it's pretty fucking obvious what's going to happen at Catalunya...and it did. Lorenzo helped himself to pole position as well as being quickest in all practice sessions. Not satisfied with that, Lorenzo went on to win a Chorizo eating contest in the Fiat Yamaha hospitality area and planted a little Lorenzoland toothpick/flag in the leftovers.

Sunday, July 4th at 2 p.m CST (Central Spanish Time)...the little red lights go away and Little Dani gets the wholeshot, but forgot to brake and ran wide which let pretty much everyone and their mama past. This put 'guess who' in the lead followed by Stoner and Dovizioso. On the Yankee tip, Spies dropped back to 5th from an 8th place start and Hayden sat back in 10th just behind Pedro.

By the end of the 1st lap, DePuniet has done a reverse full retreat and tagged on to the back of the front three...a.k.a. 4th place. Two corners later, Dovi leg-dangled his way past Stoner to take 2nd. At the begininng of the next lap, Dovi went one better and took Lorenzo for the lead into turn 1.

While this was going on, Pedro got his shit together, and was making his way towards the front o' the pack. Meanwhile, back up front, King Lorenzo was getting tired rolling around in a lowly 2nd place, and put a ridiculous pass on Dovi through the left/right Wurth chicane to take over his God-gifted spot at the top of charts. With the front three tripping over each in the battle for the lead, Pedro made his way up to 4th and looked to be closing in on the fisticuffs up front. Things settled down up fron (i.e.; got boring) until Stoner out-broke his damn self, from 3rd, and ran way off track...this put Stoner back in 5th behind Pedro and Depuniet. Stoner quickly kicked DePuniet to the curb and closed up on Pedro for 3rd.

9 laps to go, and Dovi beaches his Honda R-series211V at turn 8. This gifts Lorenzo the win, but Pedro and Stoner are still back yonder scrapping over 2nd and 3rd. ans Stoner and Pedro beat the shit out of each other for 2nd place. Pedro, somehow, came out on top of this scrap to bring it home in 2nd followed by Stoner in...um...3rd

.

Once again, Lorenzo waltzed home for the win and extended his championship lead to 52 points over Pedrosa. Dovi remounted and finished somewhere between 13th and 15th. Word on the street is that Stoner is re-jumping ship back to Honda for 2011. The other word on the street is that Rossi will take Stoner's spot to partner Hayden (and make 15 million Euros...whatever that is) on next year's on the factory Ducati team. Bellisimo! With Rossi out in 2011 at Yamaha, that would make way for Spies to move up from the Yamaha Tech 3 team to partner Lorenzo on the 2nd Fiat Yamaha factory machine. Makes sense to me.

Result

1) Jorge Lorenzo/Fiat Yamaha
2) Dani Pedrosa/Repsol Honda
3) Casey Stoner/Marlboro Ducati
4) Randy DePuniet/LCR Honda
5) Alvaro Bautista/Rizla Suzuki
6) Ben Spies/Tech 3 Yamaha
7) Loris Capirossi/Rizla Suzuki
8) Nicky Hayden/Marlboro Ducati
9) Marco Melandri/San Carlo Gresini Honda
10) Hector Barbera/Paginas Amarillas Aspar Ducati
11) Colin Edwards/Tech 3 Yamaha
12) Mika Kallio/Pramac Racing Ducati
13) Kousuke Akiyoshi/Interwetten Honda
14) Andrea Dovizioso/Repsol Honda
15) Wataru Yoshikawa/Fiat Yamaha

Grupo de Crasho

Marco Simoncelli/San Carlo Gresini Honda
Aleix Espargaro/Pramac Racing Ducati

Championship points after round 7 of 18.

1)Lorenzo-165
2)Pedrosa-113
3)Dovizioso-91
4)Hayden-69
5)DePuniet-69
6)Stoner-67
7)Rossi-61
8)Spies-59
9)Melandri-39
10)Simoncelli-39

So that's that...the next time out, the boys will goose-step into the Motherland for the German MotoGP at der Sachsenring. Rossi is planning his post-leg snap return in Germany after a successful 24 lap shakedown of his gimp leg on a World Superbike spec R1 at Misano, earlier this week. Hopefully he doesn't do the Doohan.

T...out.

*Pics from superbikeplanet.com and motogp.com