Round 2, DOHA, the return of the Mav ?

[weeksy]

So then, will Vinales do what Vinales does, finishing 11th this weekend after destroying them last weekend ?

Will Miller and the Ducati boys get their acts together on the tyre wear ?

Will the Suzuki keep their form but get better qually and grid position to give them more of a chance ?

Will KTM find a bit of form or are they destined to struggle round this track ?

Can Lowes got 2:2 and win again ?

Surely McPhee can't have the same run of luck and be skittled again...

[KungFooBob]

Will KFB find a hooky stream that is high enough res that you can actually tell which bike is which?

[formula400]

Will KFB find a hooky stream that is high enough res that you can actually tell which bike is which?

[formula400]

Moto3, bloody hope so.

Moto2, think he will win again, he looked so good in that 1st race just time he will not have it so easy.

MotoGP, anything can happen, I am not a massive of Mir but I'd like him to win, and do it well, but Bagnaia, Miller and Fabio could all be up there, like last year could be anyone

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

Moto 3 - McPhee will be skittled off around lap 10

Moto 2 - Lowes will win, Dixon will ride well but he's still not really fit enough to ride at the front end for the whole race

Moto GP - Maverick's lucky pants won't be clean and he'll come 11th, Quats will either be with him or on the podium, same goes for Morbidjelly, Rossi will be riding like he's on a trackday, both Suzukis could win, the Ducatis will lead until they shag their tyres and then go backwards. The Hondas will be behind that lot, but ahead of the KTMs, the Aprillia will be amongst the KTMs.

[lostboy]

Moto 3 - difficult to see beyond the Ajo and Tech 3 KTMs and the Petronas boys.

Moto 2 - Sam, all the way. No one is able to consistently do those lap times.

MotoGP - Vinales will fancy it again, the Suzukis will be consistent. Frankie will be up there if his steed doesn't fail him and Zarco will continue to be the "surprise" Ducati package.

[Noggin]

Will KFB find a hooky stream that is high enough res that you can actually tell which bike is which?

If KFB does, would he be good enough to share with a sad technophobe up a mountain that can't get to watch any of it (Gotta be easy, usually the links I get told to try involve pages and pages of adverts, subscription requests and I still can't see it )

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

I could put a web cam at my telly and do a pay per view Teams Meeting

[KungFooBob]

There's an Android app I use that casts hooky BT Sport to my TV, but the quality is shocking. If the proper MotoGP videopass subscription was half the price I 'd be on it like a tramp on chips, but its a bit steep at £170!!!

[Skub]

Hard to tell with Vinales,if his head is on right he'll be the man. He's never lacked talent. We've seen it before where he dominates for half the season,then the wheels fall off. He and Fabio should go to the same shrink.

Ducati will probably give their riders the same bikes as the last race,it's kinda what they do,then wonder what went wrong.

Surely Morbidelli and Rossi will have some solution to last week's misery.

Mir and Rins need good grid positions and a good start.

I don't think we'll see much KTM action towards the front until we are away from Qatar.

Lowes has looked like the man right from late last season and you'd be a gambler to bet against him.

McPhee...I sometimes wonder if I hated him would he have better results in races. The lad needs a fucking rabbit's foot or something.

[Yorick]

Hard to tell with Vinales,if his head is on right he'll be the man. He's never lacked talent. We've seen it before where he dominates for half the season,then the wheels fall off. He and Fabio should go to the same shrink.

Maybe form a tag team?

[Bigyin]

Will KFB find a hooky stream that is high enough res that you can actually tell which bike is which?

Told you before, research a mate with BT internet , they get access to BT Sport, get their login and password to the online player...... tadah, hdmi from laptop to big TV and free MotoGP

As for next weekend

Moto3 i reckon McPhee will podium as long as he doesnt get punted out again

Moto2, Lowes is the target to aim at and seems to have the measure of the field unless Bez can find a step and Remy settles into the KTM more. Jake D in the top ten and just hope his wrist gets better quickly as he is now showing some real potential at the end of last year and running into this year while still proper fucked injury wise

MotoGP. Ducati now have data to try and manage tyres, Yamaha have data to try and manage power apart from mid corner, Suzuki now have data that shows they have race pace and KTM now know why they hate Doha. HRC are still struggling and praying for marc to get back again. Aprilia are praying Aleix does well in the top ten again so they can hire Dovi after his "casual" test and flick Savadori to test role after his lack of performance even before he was injured this testing season. To be fair to the bloke he was a Superstock rider put on a MotoGP bike and it was a big ask

[Yorick]

The big thing is the temperature.
It dropped 10c between days so fucked up various tyre and Sussies choices.

The opposite may happen this coming race.

Who knows. That's why it's good.

[lostboy]

The big thing is the temperature.
It dropped 10c between days so fucked up various tyre and Sussies choices.

The opposite may happen this coming race.

Who knows. That's why it's good.

That was the teams getting their "turkeys voting for Christmas" results. It was them that complained about the practice scheduling and having to leave the circuit so late every day that all the practice sessions got brought forward to appease them. They then squealed like stuck pigs because they realised that all the data they were gathering was in the heat of the day and in conditions that bore no relationship to the races, which were still scheduled late to suit TV around the world (and particularly Europe). D'oh!!

[lostboy]

McPhee...I sometimes wonder if I hated him would he have better results in races. The lad needs a fucking rabbit's foot or something.

He's had a lot of stick about "being in the wrong place again" and yet he'd ridden the perfect race to that point and an identical race to Binder, the Ajo KTMs and the Tech 3 KTMs, namely running consistently in the top five, getting close or to the front, being passed on the straight, using the slipstream to get back to the front etc. If that twat had made that lunge up the inside a lap earlier or later then he'd have skittled Binder and a few of the orange bikes. As you rightly say, poor John needs some kind of luck.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

McPhee...I sometimes wonder if I hated him would he have better results in races. The lad needs a fucking rabbit's foot or something.

He's had a lot of stick about "being in the wrong place again" and yet he'd ridden the perfect race to that point and an identical race to Binder, the Ajo KTMs and the Tech 3 KTMs, namely running consistently in the top five, getting close or to the front, being passed on the straight, using the slipstream to get back to the front etc. If that twat had made that lunge up the inside a lap earlier or later then he'd have skittled Binder and a few of the orange bikes. As you rightly say, poor John needs some kind of luck.

It would be better to not have to rely on luck, it happens too often to just be bad luck, or God does hate the Scottish.

[weeksy]

https://www.crash.net/motogp/news/97428 ... out-rivals

Valentino Rossi wasn't the only Yamaha rider to struggle with rear tyre wear in the season-opening Qatar MotoGP, but he was the worst affected by it.

The Italian veteran, making his Petronas debut, had already slipped from fourth to seventh on the opening lap when the tyre degradation problem began to kick in after just '7 or 8' of the 22 laps.

Rossi went on to finish in twelfth place, 10.7s behind former Factory Yamaha team-mate and race winner Maverick Vinales. Maintaining tyre life is unsurprisingly his top priority for this weekend's second Doha event.

"In the first race I was not fast like I want, so we will try to change something in the setting of the bike to improve the life of the rear tyre," Rossi said. "And we see. We've worked hard, we see all the data and we have to try to improve.

"Looks like Maverick has something different in the setting of the bike and in the electronic system, they make some other settings. It's very difficult to put exactly the same settings because every rider has some small differences, but during this weekend we can try to follow another way by modifying something and we hope that we can be stronger in the race."

Fabio Quartararo was also hindered by rear tyre wear on his way to fifth position on his factory team debut

[weeksy]

Jack Miller spent the early part of last Sunday's Qatar MotoGP in the lead group, but his victory hopes ended when a 'strange vibration' began around lap 8 of 22.

The new Factory Ducati rider eventually faded to ninth and, while coy on the giving details on the eve of this weekend's second round, described it as a 'tyre related, one-off thing' that was 'not really in our hands'

"With time and understanding we were able to find what the issue was. Not really in our hands. We’ll hope the luck falls on our side this week," said Miller, who had been the fastest rider in pre-season testing at Losail."

"We suffered a strange vibration from the rear, which made me unable to carry corner speed," he added.

"Difficult to say exactly, what I can say about it: Tyre related. A one off thing. I really started having issues around the 8 lap mark. I felt like I was in purgatory. I couldn’t go forward. I couldn’t go back. I was just stuck there.

"Like I said, we just keep positive, keep working the way it is, work even more in the sessions this weekend and try and avoid something like that the best way we can."

While Miller dropping out of the victory fight, Maverick Vinales went on to win the race for Yamaha ahead of the Ducatis of Johann Zarco and Francesco Bagnaia, who both overtook the Suzuki of reigning champion Joan Mir on the run to the line.

"When Vinales came past I was able to push and follow him. I felt if all stayed normal I could have followed him a bit and see what we could have done at the end of the race. We were all rather similar at the front," Miller said.

"The Suzukis were where I expected them to be. The Yamaha, especially here, had great qualifying positions with both Fabio and Maverick and were able to not lose many positions at the start and were running at front like they should. It’s a factory team. The bike won the most races last year. They should be there."

[weeksy]

Just me watching today ?

[G.P]

No, I watched.
Last week it was aces because we'd had no MotoGP all winter. This week, at the same circuit, there's really not that much to talk about in FP1 & 2 except that FP2 is more important than FP3 tomorrow, and all the teams have base settings and are completely at the mercy or the amount of sand on the track and the wind etc.

Still, I really enjoyed it, just can't think of too much to comment about except the top 18 in MotoGP were all within 1 second of each other - shows how competitive it all is in the premier class though eh?

I think they should do SuperPole with Moto3, but with a 10 or 20 second delay in starts so they all have to make their own lap, but the circuit is full..