Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

The engine limits introduced for the 2010 MotoGP season have posed crew chiefs throughout the paddock with a delicate problem: How do you manage the engines to ensure that the rider can get the track time he needs during practice to find a good setup, yet still have an engine fresh enough and fast enough to be competitive during the race? This is a conundrum that we at MotoMatters.com have been particularly interested in, and so we decided to track someone down who could answer some of our questions.

At Barcelona we spoke to Pramac Ducati's Technical Director Fabio Sterlacchini, who also functions as Mika Kallio's crew chief, about how the team is handling the limited number of engines. How did they go about shuffling the engines to ensure that their riders always had a strong engine for the race? "We have a schedule," Sterlacchini told us, "Normally we manage the life of the engine, and we use the engine until we arrive at a mileage that we know that above this, it's better that we don't use this engine."

As usual after a MotoGP race weekend, the guys with OnTheThrottle catch up with Monster Tech 3 Yamaha's Ben Spies to talk about the weekend's events, and to evaluate with Spies how his race weekend went. In this latest episode, Spies and OTT's Dave Williams talk about how Spies' Yamaha M1 compares to the factory Yamahas, how his races at Assen and Catalunya went, and the differences between hard and soft tires. Here's the video:

Q: Can you explain what happened at Turn 1?

Casey Stoner: The air turbine basically just makes you go that much faster. Even when you're on the brakes you're still getting a slipstream, so I just wasn't able to stop fast enough, because both of them [Lorenzo and Dovizioso] were just a little bit offset, so I got a slipstream off both, and I got a little bit ahead of myself.

Q: Somebody said this is the second race that you are following the Honda because you are studying it...

CS: This should be coming from you! [Points at Italian journalist who has been badgering Stoner about whether he has signed for Honda, and the assembled press all laugh.]

But personally, I'd much rather beat it. The last race, I didn't have much chance to try to attack Dani because the arm pump came and I wasn't able even to be close enough. This race, I put my wheel in everywhere I could to try and pass Dani, but he just got the acceleration, he got good traction, and was good enough on the brakes to keep me off, and that was it. I mean, if you don't make a mistake, for me to get close enough was impossible. So this is the only reason, and it's not what everyone is thinking about me studying it! [Laughs]