Rossi is Real : Day 2 Test Results in Jerez

For the final testing sessions in Jerez before the season begins: rain. Mostly, certainly all of the first day, all the riders dressed up and nowhere to go. All the bikes are in their race liveries now, the black test fairings are gone. There was a lot of rain last year making pre-race practice sessions relatively useless. Someone went so far as to suggest riders be required to spend a certain amount of time on the track each day regardless of weather so that the poor sods who paid to watch practice actually get to see something. That hasn't happened.

Yesterday Jorge Lorenzo went out and went fast in the rain but while the test results show a fairly normal distribution of contenders and the CRT divide it wasn't very informative. Today (Sunday) however the track dried out for the end of the session and most riders got out and put in some fast laps. With a very interesting result - for the first time since last year (in the pouring rain at Silverstone), Valentino Rossi ends the day with the fastest lap time in the field.

But here's the difference - last year was wet, and Rossi's time while fastest was 16 seconds slower than the pole position pace that Alvaro Bautista would eventually set the next day in dry conditions. Rossi's best lap today? A 1:39.525, which is 0.007 seconds faster than Jorge Lorenzo's 2012 Jerez pole position qualifier in dry conditions.

There are always caveats of course, and each team's test objectives and decisions makes test results different from qualifiers for sure ("for sure, for sure" like the young riders are now saying like Marco Simoncelli used to say). Some stronger factory riders like Bautista and Stefan Bradl crashed earlier in the morning's mixed conditions but frankly they're part of the pack looking to claw their way onto the podium during the season rather than dominate it. And Marc Márquez was conspicuously absent running in 7th nearly 1.2 seconds off Rossi's time; one can assume that he missed the dry window or was testing an unusual setup or something as he is proving himself to be reliably fast.

Lorenzo and Cal Crutchlow (love seeing him mixing it up with the top brass) were less than 0.05 seconds behind Rossi, and with Dani Pedrosa only just over 0.1 behind as well it's not a crushing result, but that's all the better really, as it means (I'd like to think, after all these tests with the new Yamaha) that Rossi is ready to fight. Qatar will be very interesting! And guaranteed to be dry.

And sorry Livio Loi that you'll miss racing in Moto3 in Qatar because you'll still be 15 and too young to race there, which means Ana Carrasco gets to be the youngest rider cause she just turned 16 two weeks ago.

Márquez is a challenger

I'll admit it right off, I want to see Valentino Rossi win the championship, again. I won't make any excuses for him here and I'm certain he will be a huge source of entertainment this year (this is when one adds "if he stays healthy" which is the racing PR phrase for "doesn't get injured," less to indicate a racer is a crasher, and more like you'd knock on wood).

But Marc Márquez went faster at a brand new track than any of them. He'll be very interesting - very fast and very aggressive. Just ask Tom Luthi about Moto2's first race in Qatar almost a year ago, when Márquez ran him off the track at the end of the straightaway on the last lap to take over first position, or go watch it. That move got repeated and countered like a theme throughout the year that Márquez dominated.

Brash is fine if you're alone in the front but he'll have to deal with some unforgiving lessons in race craft from the likes of Lorenzo and Rossi. And Pedrosa is not going to relinquish his season to a rookie punk, not after winning six of the last eight races last year.

What advice would I give the new contender? Marc: stop touching your face while you're on camera.

Introduction to 2013

First things first, this material is not officially affiliated with the organization MotoGP(tm) or motorgp.com. I love their material, great stuff, and won't copy their material here, go there and get it, it's great. Likewise my opinions and views are strictly my own and are also not the opinions and views of MotoGP.

That said, I'm a fan and have opinions so I'm writing them here. MotoGP 2013 should be a very interesting championship season. Repsol, LCR, and Yamaha Factory have been riding in Texas yesterday and today, top talent sniffing out a new track and watching each other closely. Marc Márquez learns a faster line than anyone else. Faster than Dani Pedrosa or Jorge Lorenzo or Valentino Rossi.

Day two Márquez is one of only two riders to break 2:04.000 in fast conditions, and the other is Pedrosa, more than a tenth behind. Yamaha says they have seen enough and are leaving early.