(Off) Road Rage

Today I felt a bit jaded by the world, possibly because I'd read one of the unpleasant sections of TGWADT, and I don't mean the part where the author described the specification of a laptop in mindbending detail, almost as if he was trying to reach a particular wordcount and figured he'd be best off just copying verbiage from Apple's website.

I'm not going to go into what that was, because I had the much more enjoyable spectacle this afternoon of watching a very angry motorcycle racer on Youtube.

Motorcycle emptiness

Poor old Valentino Rossi fell off his motorcycle at the weekend and fractured his tibia, so his campaign to retain his MotoGP title in 2010 is over before it really began. Lucky I didn't put a bet on him to win, although I suppose that might have been illegal in Hong Kong anyway. Unless they decided to stop competing on motorcycles around the world and instead started racing polo ponies around Happy Valley.

I'm biassed against this, partly because I'm allergic to horses and more importantly because I doubt a diminutive man on a horse would make as much noise as an 800cc motorcycle going brrrrrrraaaaaaappppp round a racecourse.

Vroom vroom - MotoGP 2010

So the 2010 season has started, and Ducati's plans have already run off the track and fallen off. I think the mistake they made was to make the bike too fast - Stoner got too far ahead of the rest of the pack, forgot he was in a race, saw that it was dark, went to sleep, fell off.



Which in turn meant that Britain's favourite adopted Italian^[1] got the win. Chopping all that hair off as he entered his fourth decade was clearly a good thing, as it allows him some sort of aerodynamic advantage as he gets older, and needs all the help he can get. Although I suppose helmets do mitigate against that somewhat.

Lorenzo comes in 1.022 seconds slower. No reason for Rossi to panic yet about his teammate, but perhaps he'll spend the next week looking for a big spanner to see if another hand injury will slow the little fella down a bit.

Dovizioso in third^[2], Hayden in fourth^[3]. So it was nice that it wasn't just Yamahas up the front. Kawasaki continue to reproduce their poor form from last season. What's up with those guys?

Britain's best piano-playing MotoGP rider ... isn't a MotoGP rider any more. His replacement, who is American and doesn't have much hair, takes fifth place. As I'm British, I can't say anything more about this as contractually we have to have a big sulk and pretend that Rossi's really from Derbyshire and is only talking in an Italian accent as some sort of Midlands humour. What a wag, eh?

¹Although it is odd when you think about it, that Rossi would have chosen England as a place to live as a tax exile, and that the British public embraced him despite - or because - of that. I mean, what kind of person ostensibly moves to England to avoid high taxes?
²Rides a Honda, nothing else I can say, eh eh. (Yes, we got Lady Gaga to do the Dovizioso research this time around. Mainly because she pretends to be Italian and might have some chance of remembering where to fit the 'I's in his surname.)
³Just as everyone in Britain has to hate Casey Stoner because ... er ... because he beats Derbyshire Ross(i) and ... er ... he's Australian, we also have to overlook Hayden at every possible opportunity. I mean, it's not like he's ever been World Champion or something, has he?
Oh, he has? Well, he's an American, not like that nice Ben Spies.
Oh.