Editor's Blog

The longer I get to work in the MotoGP paddock, the more it strikes me how many talented people contribute to the show by working behind the curtain while a small percentage of personalities get most of the media attention. Rhys Edwards, whom you may recognize from his frequent position in Casey Stoner’s seat during shots of the Respol garage, is one of many people I’ve met who manage to perform roles of great responsibility while remaining friendly, approachable and warm individuals. When I learned something about his background in Formula One, I assumed he would have an interesting story to tell about his career and how he arrived at HRC, and he was generous enough to let me ask him some questions about his experience during the final GP weekend at Estoril.

Scott Jones: Rhys, you’re Communications and Marketing Manager at Honda Racing Corporation. Many of our readers may not know exactly what that means, so could you give a brief description of your role at HRC?

When I entered the media center at Losail a few weeks ago, I happened to be thinking about how many people contribute to our enjoyment of MotoGP. From the journalists who write the background stories and race reports, to photographers who show us things we can't see on video, to the large number of people who produce the TV feed, each has his or her role in bringing us closer to the racing and increasing our enjoyment of what we see. 

Years ago I was an avid bicycle racer, very much inspired by watching Greg Lemond take on the world in a sport dominated by Europeans. The TV broadcasts featured the commentary of a man named Phil Liggett, who still works as one of the main voices of cycling broadcasts in English. Liggett's enthusiasm and passion for cycling are inseparable from my experience of watching those 1980s Tours de France (and every one since, in fact), and he has stuck in my mind as someone who will be, for many, as big a part of the events he described as the events themselves.

The best of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels is, in my opinion, his last, the title of which I've borrowed for this piece. In The Long Goodbye, Chandler shows us more of what makes Philip Marlowe tick than in any of the previous novels, and along the way, as observed by my old professor Thomas Steiner, the book itself seems often to be Chandler's personal farewell to Marlowe and to the hardboiled detective novel itself. 

This off-season has been a kind of Long Goodbye of my own, in this case not to a genre of fiction or to a fictional character, but to a real one. My main task over the past few months has been to go through my photos from each race weekend I've attended since 2008 and pull out the best images to show on Photo.GP, my online archive. Each time I open a new catalog or revisit one partially processed, I'm confronted with more images of Marco Simoncelli to edit and decide if they belong on Photo.GP or not. 

You don't get many chances to get an image like this, with the entire grid together on track. Some circuits don't have a good first couple of turns, or it's hard to get there from the grid in time for the shot, or a good plan to get there is ruined by some unforeseen problem like a broken down shuttle, V.I.P. traffic on the access road, etc.

As you have surely noticed by now, the site has a new design and layout. The old layout, with light text on a dark background, has been dropped, and the new site has switched to follow the golden rule set by every website designer, usability expert and ergonomics consultant on the planet: dark text on a light background. Readers from around the world had asked for the change for a couple of years now, and I finally caved in to their requests. The readability is now vastly improved, but the framing layout with orange links on a dark background has been retained, to preserve something of the feel of the old site. Photo stories will continue to use a dark background, as we feel that the darker layout does more justice to Scott Jones' beautiful photos.

The change has not been completely finalized - there are still one or two points of the site that need to be tweaked, and all comments and suggestions for improvement are more than welcome. Some tables, in particular, could still appear with either the wrong background or the wrong text color; if you spot any errors, please feel free to drop us a line at webmaster@motomatters.com. Site supporters have a wider choice of page layouts, including the option of reverting to the previous layout with the light text on a dark background.

The San Francisco Dainese D-Store welcomed me and Jensen Beeler last week to share some of our thoughts and experiences in MotoGP. For my part of the presentation, I showed some photographs on a projector and told the stories that went along with them. A few folks asked if I could video the show, but that turned out to be a non-starter for various reasons. So instead I thought I'd write up the stories to share here for anyone who is interested. So here is the story behind...

Bradl's Angst
Assen, 2011

MotoMatters.com continues to grow in popularity - a massively heartening phenomena, for which we are all grateful - but that popularity comes with a downside: at peak times, the site can become very slow, and provide a frustrating user experience. In response to this - and in anticipation of the further growth of the site - we are switching MotoMatters.com to a different server, with more powerful hardware and much more memory. The end result, once the changeover has been made, should be a much zippier site which loads and responds faster, especially around the busiest times on race weekends.

The switch has been a little more complicated than expected, but it looks like we have everything under control, thanks to the outstanding support from our hosting company Rimuhosting.com. who we really cannot recommend highly enough (and no, we are not being paid to make that statement). The actual switchover will take place some time today (Wednesday, February 8th 2012), once the new server has been fully tested and all of the data has been transferred. In the meantime, the site may go offline for a brief period to facilitate the switch. We are working hard to make the changeover as painless as possible.

I'm going to be appearing at the San Francisco Dainese store again in February and I anticipate still more questions about photography in addition to those about what it's like to work in the MotoGP paddock, so I thought I'd post something photography-related here for those of you who enjoy taking pictures at the races. 

The above image of Marco Simoncelli at Indy is one of my personal favorites from 2011, and I thought it would be useful when talking about what a photographer can do in the darkroom, whether that's one that smells of chemicals or the digital version. While some photographers still lament the loss of film as a medium for various and often quite legitimate reasons, I am grateful for the opportunities to start with one image and end up with another via digital tools more powerful than those in the wet darkroom. This image is a good example of how digital tools turned one image into something much different, and ultimately a photograph that I place among my best of the season. 

I spent more time on the grid in 2011 than ever before and one of the interesting benefits of this was the level of details I started noticing in some of the helmets. On TV, or even at trackside, it's difficult to see exactly what the helmet designers have done to make each rider's crash hat unique.

So I started grabbing a few close up shots of helmets as they popped out of the hustle and bustle that makes up a G.P. grid. This collection is arbitrary in that I made no effort to look at each helmet to find the best ones. There simply isn't time to do that, nor is it possible to look in a systematic way since the bikes arrive in an unpredictable order, and the grid itself is a fairly hectic space until right before the start when they kick us off. 

My attention was drawn to Rich Lee's MotoGP illustrations some time ago when I stumbled across his work on Facebook. As a long-time graphic designer who has worked with many illustrators, I am often amazed at what folks like Rich are able to do: draw! I can't draw at all. Not even a little bit. Just ask my 7-yr old daughter. "That doesn't look very good, Daddy." Seriously, you'd think a half-way decent dog would be pretty easy to draw. Perhaps I'm a photographer so that I can take a picture of a dog that looks just like a dog. 

As a designer I'm also very familiar with the software digital illustrators use to turn their sketches into finished art. I use them for my own projects at a level that doesn't come close to that of which these applications are capable, so when I see a skilled illustrator do the kind of shading and detail evident in Rich's work I'm further amazed and humbled.

In August of last year I posted a desktop wallpaper on my website of the above image with a bit of information about the championship trophy's creator, GARCIAROJALS Studio in Barcelona. I'd seen the trophy up close for the first time while it was on display in the lobby of the mobile Dorna HQ building that travels to the European rounds. I was very impressed by the workmanship and design. It's quite a beaufitul bit of art, and I was pleased to share the above photo with others who shared that opinion.

Colorful, controversial, but above all, fast. That was Marco Simoncelli in a nutshell. No tribute to the man here, so many others have done it, and far better than I ever could. I recommend reading Kevin Schwantz' thoughts on Simoncelli over on the excellent Superbikeplanet site, and in Spanish, a touching story by Spanish TV editor and one of the nicest people in the paddock, Ruben Fernandez.

And now Marco Simoncelli is dead, killed in a tragic accident at Sepang, struck from behind by Colin Edwards and Valentino Rossi after losing control of his Honda. The crash was all too reminiscent of the crash that proved fatal to Shoya Tomizawa at Misano in September 2010, another incident that left the paddock stunned and lost for words. There, too, a rider lost control of their bike, crashing directly in front of other riders who had neither the time nor the space to avoid hitting him.

So similar are the two incidents that it is worth going back to the Tomizawa crash at Misano and comparing it with Simoncelli's accident at Sepang. Though Tomizawa's death hit the paddock hard, along with many hardcore motorcycle racing fans, it largely went unnoticed among the general public, as Tomizawa was killed in the Moto2 race, a support class and not the main show. Simoncelli was already a global star, racing in the biggest motorcycle racing show on earth, so naturally, his death generated a lot more coverage and raised many more questions. But the responses to Tomizawa's crash may prove instructive for both the mindset of the people involved and the direction that racing should take after Simoncelli's tragic accident.

Over the past few days, I have been asked by a number of people - either directly or via Twitter - whether I will be going to Motegi for the Japanese MotoGP round this weekend. The short answer is I won't, but I felt I owed my readers an explanation of just why not.

It all started at the Sachsenring. Well I suppose it started earlier, at Barcelona, when the first rumblings of a rider rebellion over the Motegi MotoGP round appeared, and debate erupted in the paddock over whether it would be safe to travel to Japan for the race. The paddock is split roughly into two camps separated mainly by nationality, a fact that the amateur anthropologist in me finds rather intriguing. The Spaniards and Italians - and for some reason, the majority of the Australians too - were and are dead set against the Motegi race going ahead, saying the situation at the track and at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant made staging the event far too dangerous. Those hailing from the UK and the US disagreed, saying that all of the science showed that the situation was safe at the track, and that the nuclear plant was being brought back under control. Arguments were frequent, and though still respectful, there was a complete lack of understanding and empathy on either side. The participants were starting to look at each other as if the others were completely insane.

As you may have noticed, MotoMatters.com was offline yesterday for quite a long time. The problem lay not with our hosting company, but with the data center where our hosting company houses the servers we rent from them. A fault in the power supply infrastructure meant that the building where our servers are housed went down completely.

The situation has now been rectified and we are up and running again. I am very sorry for being offline for such a long time (over half a day), but this was an unforeseen situation, and the infrastructure to protect against such a freak event is so costly that the expense is hard to justify. That is a decision that means that you, our readers, suffer, and for this, you have my sincere apologies. If you'd like to support the site and allow us to make that kind of investment, then consider taking out a subscription.

The good news is that it happened on Wednesday, rather than on Sunday. And the even better news is that we have a lot to look forward to this weekend! So again, our apologies for the outage, and we hope our coverage of the event (I am reporting live from Brno this weekend) makes up for the site being offline.

France is a wonderful country, famed for its food, its pace of life and its warm, passionate people. The Sarthe region, where the Le Mans circuit (or Circuit de la Sarthe, to give it its official name) is situated, is beautiful; rich, green, rolling hills, close woodlands, tight green valleys filled with charming towns and villages. The city of Le Mans itself has its attractions, a stately square and some grand 18th and 19th century architecture. The people in the city and the surrounding villages are warm, friendly and helpful, especially if you are prepared to make an effort to speak at least some French.

All that ends once you arrive at the circuit. It starts at the gate with the security guards, who, to be fair, are no worse than security guards at most of the other races, it being their job to be professionally unpleasant. But it gets worse as you go further in. The facility itself is ramshackle and crumbling, a patched-up shade of what was perhaps once its former glory. Once inside the building, having to deal with the circuit staff makes things worse. Specially bussed-in from Paris, they combine the miserable temperament of the curmudgeon with the professional obstructionism of the jobsworth, appearing to be selected on their disposition towards discouraging people from asking questions in the first place, and then abiding by such an arcane set of regulations with almost Teutonic efficiency that honoring requests for assistance take the entire duration of the weekend, getting the requested job done long after it has become irrelevant.