Despite the typically variable and sometimes awful weather all week at Phillip Island, the clouds seemed to understand that Sunday afternoon was to be Casey Stoner’s last race at the Australian track, and obliged the jam-packed Aussie crowd with warm rays of sunshine.

On form all week, despite his ankle injury, Stoner was a landslide favorite to win the Australian GP, and the 53,100 fans in attendance were treated to one more showing of Stoner’s unique understanding of the Phillip Island race circuit, which now has a corner bearing his name.

With Casey doing what he does best at PI, the attention as the race started was as to whether a second World Champion would be crowned this Sunday, as Marc Márquez had locked up the 2012 Moto2 World Championship just a few minutes before the MotoGP race. With Lorenzo needing to beat Pedrosa to claim his crown, the Australian GP got underway in earnest.

With the news that the injured Ben Spies would miss not only the Australian GP, but the Valencian GP as well, the American MotoGP rider’s miserable MotoGP season was abruptly ended after his fall at Sepang.

Set to ride on the Ducati Junior Team next season, Spies’ run with Yamaha now seems to have concluded, and the attention has shifted as to whom would ride in his place at Valencia, if anyone.

Despite a twitter campagin to get American Josh Hayes back on a Yamaha YZR-M1, Yamaha Racing have instead chosen test rider Katsuyuki Nakasuga to replace Ben Spies on the factory Yamaha.

Crashing hard in the Malaysian GP, it initially seemed that Ben Spies had escaped serious injury, as the Clinica Mobile staff gave the American rider a clean bill of health at the circuit. Getting examined further in Kuala Lumpur however, it became apparent that Spies had suffered quite a number of injuries – an AC shoulder separation, a cracked rib in the upper-chest area, and bruising to his lung, to be precise.

Undergoing surgery today at the National Surgery Center near San Jose, California, Spies reported on Twitter that the operation had gone well, though the extent of his injuries will mean an increase in the duration of his recovery time, with 10 to 12 weeks being the number banded about. This news means that Spies will miss not only the Australian GP, but also the Valencian GP and the post-season MotoGP testing — a serious blow to the soon-to-be Ducati rider.

Ever since Jorge Lorenzo’s #3 engine went up in smoke at Assen, after the Factory Yamaha man was scuttled by Alvaro Bautista in the first corner, MotoGP followers have been asking themselves whether Jorge Lorenzo will make it to the end of the season with the remainder of his allocation, or whether he will have to take a 7th engine and start from pit lane at some point.

As each race goes by, the questions have become more urgent: will this be the race where Lorenzo finally runs out of engines, and hands Dani Pedrosa the advantage in the championship fight?

So how is Jorge Lorenzo doing with his engines? Is he, as many suspect, in imminent danger of losing an engine, and with it potentially his second World Championship? What strategies have his pit crew been using to manage with one engine prematurely withdrawn? And will those strategies be enough to see him through to the race at Valencia?

As if crashing out of the Malaysian GP wasn’t bizarro enough, Ben Spies has announced today that he will be missing the Australian GP, as it has become evident that he injured his shoulder in his wet-weather tumble at Sepang. Although found to have no injuries by the Clinica Mobile staff at the circuit, after undergoing tests in Kuala Lumpur post-race, Spies found that he had sustained an AC shoulder separation, a cracked rib in the upper-chest area, and bruising to his lung.

Returning to the US for treatment on Tuesday, Spies will accordingly miss the MotoGP’s next stop, which is at Phillip Island. His participation in the last round of the season, the Valencian GP, is now in question as well, though it could be possible for the American to be healed enough to race within that time frame.

Though this season has been a string of highly suspicious instances of bad luck for the factory Yamaha rider, Valencia will be important round for Spies, as the post-race test will be the first opportunity for him to ride the Ducati Desmosedici race bike.

With the weather constantly the x-factor in the 2012 MotoGP Championship, the Malaysian GP unsurprisingly has seen Mother Nature play an integral part at Sepang. Limiting on-track practice time, things were surprisingly dry for MotoGP’s qualifying session, though riders came out of the pits immediately to bank some solid lap times. As the session wore on though, and the weather held, a display of talent proceeded, and another track record succumbed to the 1,000cc prototype machines.

Earlier this season, Valentino Rossi dropped the bombshell that he would be doing an about face and return to Yamaha Racing, after his failed experiment with Ducati Corse. Almost as soon as The Doctor was done making his announcement regarding his return, chatter started about whether Jeremy Burgess and his crew would join Rossi at Yamaha as well.

Confirming that news today, MCN‘s Matthew Birt talked to Yamaha’s Lin Jarvis, who confirmed that Yamaha wasn’t trying to maintain Ben Spies’ crew within the team, and that the venerable Burgess would join Rossi in the factory team’s garage.

Debuting a “crossplane” three-cylinder engine at the INTERMOT show, Yamaha has gotten the word out that it intends on making more inspiring motorcycles, and part of that plan includes the use of triples in its upcoming bikes. Knowing that at least one, if not several future Yamahas will use the hinted-at three-cylinder lump, the Brits over at Visordown have gotten word from their sources within Yamaha Japan that in the coming future, the Yamaha YZF-R6 & Yamaha YZF-R1 will be two of the bikes to receive such modifications.

I get e-mails each month asking how to get started in MotoGP or motorsports photography in general, and from time to time it occurs to me how little about this subject I knew before I started getting experience for myself.

For example, when I was imagining how incredible it would be one day to have a photo pass, one thing I never anticipated was the kind of obstacles I might have to negotiate to get to a spot I wanted to shoot from. I thought having a pass meant easier access to great spots, not more challenges to face.

One of the three “flyaway” races before the season finale in Valencia, the Japanese GP is race that is not only important to the two remaining Japanese manufacturers in the premier class, but it begins the dénouement of the MotoGP Championship.

Finding renewed vigor in his Championship hunt, Dani Pedrosa has only a handful of races left to catch Jorge Lorenzo, and win his first premier-class title. Truthfully needing Lorenzo to make a critical mistake or suffer a mechanical failure, Pedrosa also has to keep the pressure on his rival, and try to minimize the gap to his fellow Spaniard.

With each place separating the two riders likely to play a pivotal role at the end of the season, the drama unfolding in Motegi was palpable, though the action itself was a slow grind of a multi-campaign war.