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“I mean the championship is, we can say, over,” Andrea Dovizioso told the pre-event press conference on Thursday in Buriram.

With five races to go and a total of 125 points at stake, Marc Márquez leads Dovizioso by 98 points. Mathematically, the title is still open, but you would be not be wise to bet against Márquez winning the championship this season.

In FP1, Marc Márquez demonstrated both why he is leading the championship, and how the championship isn’t over until it has been put beyond mathematical doubt.

On his first run of the weekend, the Repsol Honda rider went out and posted a string of laps in the 1’31s, a second or more clear of his rivals. On his second run, he repeated that pace, becoming even more consistent.

On his third run, he exited with new soft tires, front and rear, with the intention of putting in a quick lap to secure a spot in Q2 on Saturday.

It was the same strategy as in Aragon: go out in FP1, and if you feel good on the bike, post a lap good for Q2 at the end, so that you can spend all of FP2 working on race setup in conditions that will most closely resemble the race. With rain forecast for Sunday, it seemed like the right choice.

If the weather has been the bane of MotoGP this year, then Saturday at Brno made up for an awful lot. The day started out with clear blue skies, and stayed that way just about all day.

It was still bone dry and warm when we left the track as darkness began to fall, though the occasional cloud could be spotted here and there. It was a great day for racing motorcycles.

It was apparently also a great day for crashing motorcycles. In the first session of the day, 40 minutes of free practice for the Moto3 class, 15 riders crashed, all going down like skittles.

Next up it was FP3 for MotoGP, and a further 7 riders hit the deck. Moto2 followed, and 6 more went down. By the end of the day, there had been a grand total of 48 falls.

To put that number into perspective: on Friday, in much dicier conditions, there were only 9 crashes. Over all three days of the 2014 event at Brno, there were 46 crashers.

If there are three more crashes on Sunday – and it’s race day, when risks offer better rewards – then the Automotodrom Brno will seen more crashes than in the previous seven years. They really were going down like flies.

Riding a motorcycle in California is pure bliss. Motorcyclists benefit from the state’s perpetual sunshine, its gold-kissed coasts, and of course lane-splitting for two-wheelers. Lane-splitting in California, from a legal stand-point, is sort of awkward though.

There is no law that grants motorcyclists the privilege of lane-splitting, but that doesn’t really matter when it comes to the California Vehicle Code (CVC), since there is also no provision that prohibits it.

I wouldn’t say lane-splitting in California is legal only by a technicality, but the Golden State would benefit from some more formalized words on the practice, beyond the CVC’s default that all motorists should operate their vehicles in a “safe and prudent” manner.

That might change this year though, as Assembly Bill 51 (last year’s attempt to codify reasonable lane-splitting rules) is getting an update. This is both good and bad news.

Just last May, California seemed set to be the first state in the USA to codify a lane-splitting law. That effort seems to have stalled though, with Assembly Bill 51 being pulled by the bill’s authors, after the California State Senate didn’t seem to have the same support for the law that the State Assembly had shown.

This action doesn’t change much for Californian motorcyclists, who can still legally lane-split through traffic, though they do so under the state’s more nebulous “safe and prudent” catch-all driving provision.

The news, however, is a huge blow for lane-splitting advocates in the rest of the country, who hoped that California’s codification of its lane-splitting practice could be a model law for the rest of the United States.

The University of California Berkeley has finished its study of lane-splitting in California, and the results are encouraging for lane-splitting proponents.

Researchers, led by Dr. Thomas Rice of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), reviewed nearly 6,000 motorcycle-involved traffic collisions between June 2012 and August 2013, including 997 in which the riders were splitting lanes at the time of the crash.

The big takeaway from this research is that when done reasonably, lane-splitting is just as safe as riding a motorcycle. As such, one of the more important insights found by Rice and his team was that motorcyclists can travel up to 15 mph faster than the flow of traffic with no statistical increase in crashing.

This study will be important for shaping the conversation about lane-splitting, not only in California, but throughout the entire United States. It’s no coincidence then that California’s current attempt to codify lane-splitting mirrors these findings from UC Berkeley.

If there is one rider in the entire MotoGP paddock who recalls the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it is Marc Marquez. Around the paddock, speaking to the press, at public appearances, the Spaniard is soft-spoken, polite, friendly. When he speaks, he speaks only in commonplaces, his media training having expunged any trace of opinion or controversy from his speech (in either English or Spanish). Put him on a bike, however, and the beast is unleashed. He is merciless, in his speed, in his ownership of the track, and in his disregard of anyone else on the track.

So it was unsurprising that the Spaniard should find himself in trouble once again. During the afternoon practice, Marquez slotted his bike underneath an unsuspecting Simone Corsi going into turn 10, sending the Italian tumbling through the gravel in the process.

The move was reminiscent of the incident at Motegi, where Marquez barged past Mika Kallio with similar disregard for the consequences, but unlike Motegi, this time Marquez received a penalty from Race Direction, for contravening section 1.21.2, a section Marquez by now must now almost by heart. That part of the Sporting Regulations which governs ‘riding in a responsible manner which does not cause danger to other competitors’. For his sins, Marquez is to start from the back of the grid on Sunday, regardless of where he qualifies.

The punishment has been coming for a while. Race Direction has been working this year on taking previous behavior into account, and that, above all, was the reason for Marquez to have his wrist slapped.

The list of incidents involving Marquez is long: starting with the collision with Thomas Luthi in the very first race at Qatar; the clash with Pol Espargaro at Barcelona, causing Espargaro to crash out; the collision with Kallio at Motegi; and now this incident with Corsi at Valencia. There were numerous other minor incidents in which Marquez featured, the Barcelona incident, for example, coming at the end of a race which had seen a fair smattering of other questionable moves.

john-hopkins

John Hopkins last week at Assen. While initial reports suggested that no bones had been broken, Hopkins, upon his return back to California, found that in addition to the muscle and tendon damage suffered in the dislocation, he also had a fractured femur. The renowned surgeon and motorcycle crash specialist, Dr. Ting operated on Hopkins on Monday, inserting screws to fix the fracture. Hopper has already left the hospital to start his recovery at his California home, and hopes to return to competitive action at the US round of WSBK at the Miller Motorsport Park on May 31st.

 

Honda went into the Indonesian Grand Prix widely seen as potential front runners. Pol Espargaro had been fastest in the test at Mandalika a month previously, Marc Marquez had been quickest on the second day of the test, Honda riders had set a consistently fast pace, looking better than their single-lap speed.

What’s more, Espargaro was coming off a podium at the season opener at Qatar, the race where Marc Marquez had finished fifth.

To say the Indonesian Grand Prix ended badly for Honda is an understatement. Pol Espargaro was fastest Honda once again, but the Repsol rider crossed the line way down in 12th, 33 seconds behind the winner, Miguel Oliveira.

Espargaro was one of only two Honda riders to finish in the points, crossing the line just ahead of Alex Marquez on the LCR Honda in 13th. Takaaki Nakagami could only struggle to a 19th place, 49 seconds behind the winner.

That wasn’t the really bad news, however. The worst blow for Honda was the fact that Marc Marquez manage to miss the race, and perhaps endanger his chances of the 2022 title, or worse. Much worse.