Colin Edwards

With the highest-profile moves all officially confirmed, MotoGP's Silly Season is starting to run out of steam. The big surprises are out of the way, and we are left with just over half the seats still unfilled. But even for the unsigned rides, names have already been penciled in, some rather more firmly than others. 

The two big names still waiting to put their signatures under contracts are surely Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa. Lorenzo's Brazilian manager is said to be playing hardball with Yamaha, trying to extract the best possible conditions out of the Japanese factory now that the sales powerhouse Valentino Rossi has left Yamaha to go to Ducati. Rumors of a 14 million euro salary demand are unconfirmed, but with Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica likely to take on sponsorship of the Yamaha squad, Lorenzo might be expected to earn that in sponsorship by allying his selling power to the Telefonica brand.

Being a Texan, Ben Spies is naturally unfazed at being thrown out of the saddle

Nico Terol shows that blue can be the fastest color

Seeing eye-to-eye: Colin Edwards ...

The industrious folks in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway press office have done part of our job again, collecting quotes from fifteen of the seventeen MotoGP riders for tomorrow's MotoGP race. Even better, they came up with a selection of fascinating statistics from today's qualifying session as well. Here's the official IMS press notes and quotes:

MotoGP QUALIFYING NOTES:

The impressively efficient press department at Indianapolis Motor Speedway collected and provided the following collection of quotes from fourteen of the seventeen MotoGP riders after the first session of free practice. Thanks to Paul Kelly and his staff for doing our job for us:

CASEY STONER (No. 27 Ducati Team, first): (Since you didn't run here last year, how hard was it to set up the motorcycle?): "We know genuinely the layout of the circuit. We know how the bike is going to react on a certain type – whether it's fast corners, slow corners, heavy braking or not. We had enough data from '08 just to start with, in general. There will be three or four different groups of circuits that we go to that we know what setup works. So we start with that rough idea; that's how we start every weekend. We'll know from previous years what roughly works on this style of circuit and then we just go from there. Out of the box it (the motorcycle) wasn't great. We tried one setting and completely went the wrong way, and it felt horrible. We came back and tried going a different direction and made another step and made it feel a little better, and we tried the last thing to make another improvement and sort of went backward again. We just have to go back and forth until we find that point where we're getting all aspects of the bike working."

MODERATOR: We said all the things, Jorge, 77 points, wins at Laguna, Indianapolis. You come here in very, very good shape.

JORGE LORENZO: Yes, I come here in very good shape. You know, all the things are going so well this year. There was sort of -- I got second position, so I couldn't ask for anything more. And we come here in a track that I love. In 2008 with a lot of rain and very hard conditions, I made my first podium in rain in my career, and last year I won. So it's always very positive that MotoGP comes here in America, and I'm happy for that.

MODERATOR: And just walking into the Motor Speedway is a special place, an iconic place, isn't it?

LORENZO: Yeah, very special with a lot of history and a lot of races here in the past. And obviously we are -- we want that this continues for long years, but I don't know whether it's going to happen for the next years.

MODERATOR: We sat here two weeks ago, not here but in the press conference in Brno in the Czech Republic, you said: "Now I think very hard about the championship. I have to be careful. Wins not so important but podiums. We just want to win the race again." Is it the same philosophy here, the same theory?

Race day pictures from Brno, courtesy of Jules Cisek:

Andrea Iannone looked like doing another disappearing act in the Moto2 race, then went backwards

In good company: Rookie Marco Simoncelli chases two MotoGP and one WSBK champion

Dani Pedrosa hung in there a long time, but there was no staying with Jorge Lorenzo

Yesterday, we discussed who is going where in the factory teams in MotoGP. For the most part, those deals are either public, or really badly-kept secrets. Today, we'll look at the situation among the satellite teams, a situation which is much, much less clear-cut than the factory squad, in part because the factory deals have not all been announced yet. The number of changes are suprisingly few, reflecting in part the problems in MotoGP. As costs rise, the cost of being competitive is growing, and more importantly, the cost of failure is increasing as well.

As a consequence, teams are not willing to take chances on unproven but promising talent. The learning curve in MotoGP is now so steep - electronics, bike setup, but most especially tires - that it takes half a season to start to get your head around the class. Limited testing has made the situation much, much worse, raising the penalty for rookies entering the class even further - the scrabbling around for substitute riders for Valentino Rossi, Hiroshi Aoyama and Randy de Puniet illustrating the case perfectly.

Colin Edwards has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with his current position in MotoGP. Almost from the beginning of the year, the Monster Tech 3 Yamaha rider has complained about a lack of acceleration from his satellite Yamaha, and the Texan's complaints have fueled rumors that Edwards may be in his last year in MotoGP.

It appears that there is some substance to those rumors. In an interview with the leading American website Superbikeplanet.com, Edwards admitted to Dean Adams that World Superbikes is looking increasingly attractive to the Texan. "That's what is enticing," Edwards told Superbikeplanet, "to look at that scenario and finish my career with a World Championship or two." His children have never seen their father on the top step of the podium, despite the fact that Edwards is a double World Superbike champion with 31 WSBK victories to his name, and this is a powerful factor motivating Edwards to consider the switch back to WSBK, Edwards admitted.