Yuki Takahashi

Valencia has not so far been a lucky venue for Tech 3's Moto2 team. The team was scheduled to test at the Ricardo Tormo circuit in December, and were confronted with snow, a rarity in this part of Spain. Returning  to the track for this week's test alongside some of the World Superbike teams, they were spared snow, but instead had to deal with two days of rain and a cold and wet track. So when the sun came out on Thursday morning, the team breathed a collective sigh of relief. As Herve Poncharal put it: "We got here on Monday and since then we have only had 4 hours on track, but finally we got some work done."

Poncharal was delighted with the way the final day of testing went for Tech 3's own bike. "I am very, very happy, we made a big step forward," the Tech 3 team boss told MotoMatters.com. "We didn't find any chatter with the chassis, which was a problem we had at earlier tests." The chatter had been solved at a previous test with a revised chassis, but the conditions were such that the team hadn't been able to confirm the changes had fixed the problem entirely. In the better conditions - "Not good, only decent," Poncharal qualified - neither Yuki Takahashi nor Raffaele de Rosa encountered the chatter.

It is a tradition to look back at the end of the year, and pick out the highlights of the season. Certainly for us at MotoMatters.com, the highlights have been Scott Jones' beautiful photos. Having paddock access for the first time meant that Scott could attend more races and take better photos. Over the next few days, we'll be going back and selecting a few of our favorites from among the very many beautiful shots Scott took for us. If you see any photos you'd like to have on your wall, then drop Scott an email to ask about pricing. And if you want to help us do it all over again in 2010, then head over to the donate page and send us a contribution. Here are some of Scott Jones' photos from Qatar to help persuade you of the wisdom of that decision.

Of the 18 men who started the season, three would be gone by Valencia

The night race at Qatar may be weird, but it does generate some spectacular photos of sparks ...

... or shift lights, as Chris Vermeulen's visor demonstrates

Casey Stoner started the season as he meant to go on

The Moto2 grid is slowly starting to fit together. Today came the announcement from the Tech 3 team that they had signed 250cc star Raffaele de Rosa and former MotoGP rider Yuki Takahashi to ride the team's Moto2 bike, built and designed by Tech 3's technical guru Guy Coulon. As team mate to the last ever 250cc World Champion Hiroshi Aoyama, De Rosa did very well indeed, winning the rookie of the year award in the 250cc class and finishing on the podium twice. After a strong year in 250s, Takahashi struggled on the MotoGP bike, but the experience in both classes should stand the Japanese rider in good stead for the new Moto2 formula.

Yesterday we reported that Yuki Takahashi would not be racing at Laguna Seca, today the news is even worse. In a statement issued jointly by Team Scot and Honda, the team announced that Takahashi has been dropped for the rest of the season, in favor of Gabor Talmacsi. The reasons for the decision were simple, and stated plainly: It was a matter of money. Team Scot needed the income provided by Gabor Talmacsi and their new sponsor, Hungarian oil company Mol, but couldn't afford the extra bikes needed to allow them to run both Talmacsi and Takahashi. And so Takahashi had to go, as the Japanese rider's results so far had been very disappointing.

The withdrawal of Takahashi leaves the MotoGP class without a Japanese rider for the first time since 1992, a situation the Japanese factories - and especially Honda - have struggled to avoid for many years. But the flow of talent coming out of Japan recently has dropped to just a trickle, with fewer Japanese rider entering through the 125 series and working their way up through the ranks. The question is now whether next season will see the return of a Japanese rider, with 250cc championship leader Hiroshi Aoyama the current favorite to make the step up to MotoGP.

Below is the text of the press release issued by Team Scot concerning the release of Yuki Takahashi:

Earlier, we reported on a story on usually reliable GPOne.com that Yuki Takahashi was out of Team Scot, to be replaced by Gabor Talmacsi. But after MCN reported seeing Takahashi in California at the rental car pick up desk, we contacted Team Scot to get the official story on Takahashi's future in the team.

The Team Scot press officer confirmed to MotoGPMatters.com that Takahashi will not be riding at Laguna seca, but denied that Takahashi had been dropped altogether. "Yuki has a slipped disc and his results on track are conditioned by this problem," Stefano Bedon told us. "The team would face a lot of extra costs to line up two riders but without the possibility to improve the results. The solution is to wait for his recovery and to defer a decision later."

From the moment Gabor Talmacsi confirmed the rumors of a ride with the Team Scot Honda squad in MotoGP by turning up at Barcelona with a new sponsor and a contract, the writing has been on the wall for Yuki Takahashi. Despite the denials and promises from the team to try and find a way of accommodating both riders, in reality, it was merely a question of time before the Japanese rider would be forced to make way for the Hungarian, who was bringing a much-needed cash injection into the squad.

That time, according to the authoratitive Italian site GPOne.com, is now. Takahashi, it is being reported, has been withdrawn from the US Grand Prix at Laguna Seca, ostensibly to allow surgery to be performed for back problems Takahashi suffered in his crash at Barcelona. The surgery will require a recovery period of 3 months, leaving Takahashi sidelined for the rest of the season. Just how badly Takahashi required surgery remains open to speculation, but his back injury is extremely convenient.

Team Scot manager Cirano Mularoni was open about the problems faced running two riders without spare bikes. "It was a difficult situation," he told GPone.com," because contrary to what I had read, extra spares were not available for the RC212V, a situation which would have gotten worse after Brno, with the limit on the numbers of engines. Not to mention the problems we would have faced in a flag-to-flag race, where we would have been forced to change wheels instead of bikes." Just where Mularoni read that Honda had extra RC212V parts lying around is a bit of a mystery, for HRC have made no secret of their aversion to supplying any more bikes, especially since sales slumped in aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Qualifying for Sunday's Catalunya Grand Prix took place in intense heat, making the conditions difficult for both riders and bikes. The riders were thankful that this was the first outing for Bridgestone's asymmetric dual compound tires, for the combination of very high track temperatures and the Barcelona track's endless right handers made a very hard compound necessary on the right-hand side of the tire, but a relatively softer compound on the left-hand side.

The heat meant that the early running was made by the riders on the hardest of the tires available, the extra-hard rear and the hard front, the compounds the teams are almost certain to be using in the race tomorrow. It was Jorge Lorenzo who took practice for the race to the greatest extreme, the Spaniard starting out the session with a monster run of 17 laps, over two thirds of race distance.

It wasn't just a long run, however, Lorenzo also demonstrated he was on race pace, taking the top spot after just a couple of laps, briefly ceding it to Andrea Dovizioso, then snatching it back, the first rider to lap under 1'43, with a time of 1'42.990. A lap later, Lorenzo took another two tenths off his time, setting out a marker of where race pace will be, and following it up with a long string of laps in the high 1'42s and low 1'43s.

The only person capable of following was Lorenzo's Fiat Yamaha team mate, Valentino Rossi. Rossi too ran low 1'43s, taking a provisional 2nd place on the grid with a quarter of the session gone. The other candidates for victory tomorrow were all running mid-1'43s, a couple of tenths off Rossi's pace.

The advent of Gabor Talmacsi to the Scot Honda team led to an avalanche of speculation that this would be the end of current rider Yuki Takahashi's MotoGP career. The two men have a single bike each at this weekend's Catalunya Grand Prix, which works fine when the sun is shining, but would make a flag-to-flag race in mixed conditions an impossible challenge. This bald fact prompted speculation that there would only be room for one rider in the team, and that rider would be the one who could bring money in in the form of sponsorship.

But in an informal press conference, Cirano Mularoni, boss of the Scot Honda team, denied that Takahashi would be given his marching orders at the end of this weekend. "Our plan is to run two riders for the rest of the season. We will need two more bikes for this, but of course they will be difficult to obtain so late after the start of the year," Mularoni said, according to MotoGP.com.

Honda has always denied it was capable of providing any more bikes, and after a winter of cost-cutting measures, the mood is not one of expansion. There is, however, an overriding reason why this time, things could be different. The Japanese factories - with Honda at their helm - have long ensured that MotoGP has a Japanese rider in the series. If Takahashi were to be forced out, this would leave MotoGP without a regular Japanese rider for the first time since 1991. This is unlikely to be acceptable to Honda, as the factory team with the strongest ties back to Japan, and it is not unthinkable that Honda might just step up to provide the extra equipment and keep Takahashi in the series.

By Assen, we should know how successful that attempt has been. And with the wildly variable weather Holland has had for the past few weeks, varying between pleasantly warm and cold and very, very wet, a flag-to-flag race is a very likely scenario at Assen.

Qualifying for the MotoGP class at Mugello took place under a hot Tuscan sun, the weekend continuing as it started yesterday. And just like yesterday afternoon, it was Valentino Rossi taking an early lead, cracking under the race lap record and into the 1'49s on just his 3rd lap. Rossi had been goaded into action after the morning session in which Casey Stoner once again did what he does best, which is to start fast and never let up, the Australian setting an astonishing 1'49.323 in the second session of free practice. So by laying down the law early in qualifying, Valentino Rossi set out his stall, making it clear to all what it would take to beat him.

For the first half of qualifying, the only man capable of getting close to Rossi was his team mate Jorge Lorenzo. Both Fiat Yamaha men spent the first 30 minutes doing long runs and race simulations, the pair of them putting in terrifyingly consistent runs in the mid to high 1'49s, setting the pace that will be needed for victory at Mugello on Sunday. Only Colin Edwards looked capable of approaching the pace of the Fiat Yamahas, the Texan demonstrating that the Monster Tech 3 Yamaha is very close to the factory bikes in performance.

The halfway point of the session came and went, and the wait began for the first real challenge to Rossi's dominance. The expectation was that it would come from Casey Stoner, as Stoner's time from the morning session was still nearly half a second quicker than Rossi's provisional pole session, but the Australian was having problems with the Ducati, spending time diving in and out of the pits to adjust the bike, and get the machine to turn.

Going into Saturday afternoon's MotoGP qualifying session at Jerez, it was unusually hard to say who was likely to take pole. At Qatar, Casey Stoner had destroyed all-comers, and had also dominated the IRTA test here a month ago. But after two sessions of free practice, any of five men looked possible candidates for pole position. Valentino Rossi had utterly dominated Friday's free practice session, with Loris Capirossi and Casey Stoner some way behind, but Saturday morning was a different kettle of fish. In FP2, it was local heroes Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo who blasted the opposition, with Casey Stoner once again forced to settle for 3rd.

And as the green lights went and the riders rolled out of pit lane and onto the track, it was the two Spaniards who quickly made the early running. Lorenzo took the first shot at pole, but Dani Pedrosa soon took it away from the Mallorcan with a much more serious attempt in the low 1'40 bracket. With times in free practice regularly hitting the mid 1'39s, it was clear that there was plenty left to go.

With so much of practice already scrapped as part of the cost savings measures, the first half of qualifying was set further refining race setup, the teams looking for settings that will work with the hard tires they expect to use in the race. But as the clock ticked down past the 20 minutes to go mark, riders started to sling on the softer of the two compounds available and chase grid positions for the race on Sunday.

As a reminder of what we lost when we lost the special qualifying tires, Randy de Puniet made some of the early running, quickly getting up into 2nd, and then losing out in the final section after registering blazing times through the first three parts of the track. But it wasn't until the 15 minutes to go mark had passed that qualifying began in earnest.

Changing the way that Qualifying works is apparently the latest fashion in motorcycle racing. The World Superbike series did it by dropping the old single-lap Superpole format, and adopting a series of three knockout sessions, shameless copied from Formula One. MotoGP would protest that it has changed its qualifying format - though cost-cutting measures have reduced the length of qualifying from an hour to just 45 minutes - but the adoption of the single tire rule and the disappearance of full-on one-lap qualifying tires left MotoGP followers wondering just how this would affect the way the teams and riders approached Qualifying.

As the session started, at least one thing remained unchanged. Within a few minutes of the green lights, and on his first couple of laps out of the pits, Casey Stoner was laying down a blistering pace. The 2007 World Champion had cracked into the 1'56 bracket, and by his fourth lap, came within 0.009 of equaling the fastest time of the weekend, set by none other than Casey Stoner. The Marlboro Ducati rider was setting the bar for the rest of the field.

Though no one could directly challenge Stoner, he did not enjoy his huge (over a second) advantage for long. Within a few minutes, Valentino Rossi had jumped up to second fastest, just over 3/10ths of a second behind the Australian. Stoner did not wait long to respond: Six minutes later, the Australian was back out on track and cracking another barrier, into the 1'55s, extending his lead to over a second again with a lap of 1'55.504.

Behind Rossi, the fight for third was hotting up, with first Loris Capirossi taking the last front row spot, then Colin Edwards, before Andrea Dovizioso also got involved. Dovi held the spot for five more minutes, before Jorge Lorenzo confirmed his strong form at Qatar by blitzing a lap just short of Rossi's second place time.

The waiting really is over for MotoGP fans, as the MotoGP bikes finally took to the track at Qatar to compete in earnest. First blood in the 2009 campaign went to Casey Stoner on the Marlboro (and at Qatar, it really is a Marlboro) Ducati, a fact that shocked absolutely nobody. As ever, Stoner was fast from the moment he rolled out onto the track, getting down into 1'57 territory within ten minutes, and slashing a further 0.8 seconds off his time with 12 minutes of the session left. 

For a long time, Stoner's advantage seemed insurmountable, but in his final run, Valentino Rossi closed the gap from a second to get to within 0.4 of a second, with the potential for more if he hadn't run into traffic on a very fast lap. Though four tenths is a sizable gap, Rossi will feel he is at least in touch with Stoner, and with two more sessions to go, and no qualifying tires to distort the grid, the reigning world champion will be confident of staying with Stoner away from the line.

Third fastest man in the opening session of 2009 was Colin Edwards, the only other rider capable of getting within a second of Stoner, and looking as strong here as he looked last year during practice. Rossi's Fiat Yamaha team mate Jorge Lorenzo makes it three Yamahas in the top four, Lorenzo 1.2 seconds behind but with more likely to come.

The session threw up plenty of surprises. Such as Alex de Angelis in 5th, for example, but de Angelis also showed his Mr Hyde by running wide into the gravel during the session, a harbinger of what is to come, perhaps. An even bigger suprise was Mika Kallio finishing 7th, after having been as high as 5th earlier in the session. Though we've only had one 45 minute session of practice to judge him by, Kallio's single fast lap at the IRTA test at Jerez could possible be the rule rather than the exception.

The talented Scott Jones, MotoGPMatters.com's photographer, is out at Qatar covering the race for us, and is already sending back some fantastic photos, and more. But just to get the season off to a good start, here's his shots from the grid presentation earlier today. All of the pictures should link to larger, desktop-sized images.

Valentino Rossi's Fiat Yamaha M1

With the IRTA Test behind us, it is an interesting exercise to map out the best times for all of the riders over the entire two-day weekend of testing at Jerez. Unsurprisingly, the best times for most people were set during the BMW M Award session, but the lack of qualifying tires this year, combined with the fact that that 45 minute session was disrupted by both the weather and James Toseland's crash meant  that there was not so much in it. Casey Stoner came out of both the M Award and the entire weekend as the clear winner, although both Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo were closer than these times suggest. Jorge Lorenzo, in particular, made a big step forward, and looks like he could run with Rossi, Stoner and Pedrosa this season, though he is still not ready to challenge for the title. At least, that's what he says.

But the Suzukis are back on track again too. This is the third different track at which Loris Capirossi and Chris Vermeulen have been competitive, and it looks like they could be close to the fight for the podium this year again. Mika Kallio pulled out a single perfect lap for the M Award session, but otherwise, was further off the pace, and the Ducatis which aren't ridden by Casey Stoner seem to be struggling once again. Vito Guareschi, Ducati's test rider, was out with a cast aluminium chassis, suggesting they may be experimenting with a chassis which copes with crashing better, anticipating the single bike rule expected to come into effect in 2010, but the factory riders stayed with the carbon fiber frame. Casey Stoner tried both an aluminium and a carbon fiber swingarm, and ended up on the carbon fiber item.

Honda look to be struggling still, and are badly missing the input of the injured Dani Pedrosa, Andrea Dovizioso still lacking experience in bike development, though he is learning fast. HRC will have a lot of catching up to do once Pedrosa's knee is healed, and the Spaniard is back in action. While Hayate seem to have solved some of the rear traction problems they were having, at least on a dry track which has some heat in it. Marco Melandri may not end up being 18th everywhere after all, though Qatar could still be a problem, where a cold track could cause him problems.

In two weeks time, all this speculation will end, thank heavens, as the riders hit the track and start racing once again. The time for talking is nearly at an end, and the time for twisting the throttle is almost here.

After heavy rain and thunderstorms disrupted the final minutes of the BMW M Award session, a wet track and overcast skies kept most of the field off the track for the final session. Only those still with testing to do took to the track, and only then after the rain had finished. Andrea Dovizioso was among the hardest working of the riders, and saw his hard work rewarded with the fastest time, ahead of Chris Vermeulen, once again demonstrating both his prowess in the wet and the progress of the Suzuki, and Marco Melandri, who has less to worry about the rear of the Hayate / Kawasaki when grip is down anyway.

Despite the dismal weather, groups of diehard fans sat scattered around the track, waiting for the occasional bike to pass. They stuck it out all the way to the end, proof that MotoGP is still alive and well in Spain, no matter the problems which surround the series. We'll be back here in five weeks time, but before that, MotoGP heads for the freak show that is the MotoGP night race opener at Losail, Qatar. In two weeks' time, we'll be actually racing.

Times of the final session of testing from Jerez