....starts this weekend, no comments? Finally... finally... Haga?
Haga's going to find yet another way to come second. IMHO. Crutchlow is a crazy man. I think this is the year that the old guard of Haga, Toseland, Vermeulen, Corser, Checa, Biaggi discover they've got a real fight on their hands. Haslam, Crutchlow and Rea have the attitude and machinery to push them about. I think Superpole was a reflection partly of the numerous crashes and partly of some bad choices of when to use the 2 qualifiers. But then Crutchlow pulls a 3rd place out of a race tyre as he'd already used both Qs. I think Camier is faster than 16th and should make it into the top 10 tomorrow. And Byrne's big highside may have left the team without a competitive bike and Shakey, shaken. If the team can find the money and Ducati supply the bikes, then Checa and Shakey will end up doing what Shakey did last year, good but not startling rides just out of TV shot. I don't see them really able to be up with the top 5 or 6 through the year. Bring it on.
Not making excuses for him, but I think Crutchlow, Toseland and the team made way too many mistakes. Not least was an extra 10hp, -10Kg (or whatever) and insufficient testing to get the traction control right with the effect of the changes. Flying replacement seat units out between the test and race to try and get rid of chatter is the sort of thing BMW did, not Yamaha. Good racing though wasn't it. Though marred by a surprising number of crashes that all affected the racing in some way. Xaus taking out Haga on the way into Doohan's. Shakey Byrne de-tuning himself. What's good for the year is just how close everyone is. There's a lot of people who will have at least one good circuit or race day. This weekend was definitely Haslam, Guintoli, Suzuki's and Checa's. It's not at all clear to me that they'll manage this every weekend. We'll see. Odd to see Biaggi (and Camier) have mixed confidence in the front end. Some times both of them would absolutely rail into the corners. At other times both of them bottled out and ran wide or off the track.
Was this on Speed Channel in the USA? My Tivo Season Pass did not pick it up, and I cannot find any schedule for WSB for Speed. Thanks.
Yes. My season pass didn't pick it up either. I had to start a new one. It was on last week at 2:00 and 3:00 central standard time. -Dirt-
Thanks. They must have changed the name from "FIM Racing". DO you recall what the new name is? The next race is too far out to find it, so I'll set up a wishlist. What a disappointment to miss the race.
I'll check tonight or tomorrow when I'm home. On a different note I was disappointed to see that the broadcast quality is still s**t. It appears as if we're still getting either a PAL or NTSC SD signal upconverted to NTSC HD on Speed and the picture quality was extremely poor. Some of the text boxes were almost unreadable. I find quality like this inexcusable. If the broadcast is in SD, so be it, I can accept that, but the conversion could be handled much, much better. I watch a good number of SD DVDs on my blu- ray player and the upconversion there is really quite good, so I know what we're getting on Speed could be much better. Given that F1 is still broadcast in SD and the F1 quality on Speed is much better than WSBK, I'm thinking it has something to do with Dorna(?) and how they handle the signal transfer. -Dirt-
Champ - thanks for the offer, but no need. My home internet is so slow I cannot load torrents. I tried for a week to get the MXdN 2008 torrent and could not load it. Finally, I was in Brisbane on my way to Phillip Island MotoGP and loaded it there!
