After Estoril, the MotoGP circus has washed up at Le Mans - though your humble narrator is not at the track, for reasons which I have laid out in a blog post elsewhere - with the prospect of some genuinely interesting developments at the circuit. After all, Le Mans is the first race after the one-day Estoril test, held on the Monday after the Portuguese Grand Prix, which saw a number of riders make some big steps forward; the revised front subframe / chassis on the Ducati GP11 worked well for both Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden; Jorge Lorenzo went back to some settings he used in 2010, and immediately found the confidence on the brakes he was missing during the race; and Casey Stoner had finally got the 2011-spec Ohlins forks to work on his Honda without them chattering in the corners.
But of course the first order of business was the soap opera that the 2011 MotoGP season has become. Valentino Rossi appears to be the main instigator, the Italian leaving Estoril with a few parting shots about MotoGP riders being "pussies" and like children, as we recounted in the post-test round up on Monday. Things got stirred up even further over the World Superbike event at Monza, when rumors emerged that Rossi was claiming to have been blocked and run off the track by Casey Stoner at the Estoril Monday test - which took place after the TV cameras had been removed after the race. Rossi further fanned the flames, rather ingeniously, by both confirming the incident and playing it down when he attended the opening of an Enel store at Milan earlier this week.
George Andrews Luigi Anelli Marcel Ankone Hans Georg Anscheidt Alessandro Antonello
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