Randy de Puniet

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.

The press office of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway continue to do an outstanding job, collecting the following notes and quotes from the riders in today's MotoGP race. For quotes from the podium riders, see the separate news item.

MotoGP POST-RACE NOTES:

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."

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.

MotoGP coming to the US gave the folks over at OnTheThrottle a chance to get into the paddock and talk to some of the people behind the scenes. One of the most interesting characters David Williams caught up with was LCR Honda's Christophe 'Beefy' Bourgignon, crew chief to Randy de Puniet and his replacement Roger Lee Hayden, filling in while De Puniet recovers from the broken tibia and fibula he suffered at the Sachsenring. In the video interview, Bourgignon discusses Roger Lee Hayden's progress on the MotoGP bike, the difficulty of adapting to the Bridgestone tires, and the intricacies of riding a MotoGP bike. Here's what Bourgignon had to say to OTT.

Valentino Rossi's record recovery from injury, taking just 41 days to return to racing after breaking his tibia and fibula at Mugello, appears to have brought out the competitive spirit in Randy de Puniet. The Frenchman suffered a similar injury to Rossi's, fracturing his tibia and fibula in a race crash involving Mika Kallio at the Sachsenring, ironically, the very race that Rossi made his return at. Now, De Puniet is targeting a return just 26 days after his accident, two full weeks earlier.

De Puniet was luckier than Rossi, as his fractures were not compound and that the bones did not puncture the skin. But a return to active service so shortly after the injury is almost unheard of, and hard to believe it is medically possible. De Puniet had a large titanium pin inserted into his tibia, to fix the bone, and has since been undergoing treatment using the same hyperbaric chamber therapy that Rossi used to help speed his recovery. In addition to the hyperbaric chamber, De Puniet also used ultrasound to help the bones knit together better. As the LCR Honda rider is already walking without crutches, and is back in the gym working on his fitness program, De Puniet believes he will be fit enough to race at Brno a week on Sunday.

The search for a replacement MotoGP rider, which seemed so difficult for Valentino Rossi and Hiroshi Aoyama, has not been so complicated for Randy de Puniet's replacement, it seems. Last night, we reported on rumors that Roger Lee Hayden was to replace the Frenchman on the LCR Honda at Laguna Seca, and this morning, it appears that the news has been confirmed. The extremely well-connected Italian site GPOne.com is reporting that the the youngest of the three Hayden brothers has been confirmed as De Puniet's replacement for the Red Bull US GP in Monterey.

Hayden was an obvious choice to replace De Puniet at Laguna, as he had several key factors working in his favor. Firstly, he has experience on a MotoGP bike, although that experience is from 2007, when he rode a wildcard Kawasaki at Laguna, finishing 10th on his first time on the bike. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Roger Lee knows Laguna Seca like the back of his hand, having ridden it in the AMA for so many years. This is a crucial factor in selecting the American, as any former 250 or current Moto2 riders drafted in are unlikely ever to have seen the track, as the junior classes have never accompanied MotoGP to California since the series returned there in 2005, for reasons of cost.