Racing, after all, is a business; few of those involved would participate if the money suddenly disappeared. Many fans are attracted, in part, by the possibility of seeing vehicles going airborne, whereas none would pay to watch rush hour traffic. Promoters discovered long ago that higher speeds (and more violent collisions) lead to greater attendance and higher profits. The inevitable, though surprisingly rare, result is that young lives are snuffed out.

After a grueling week in the blast furnace known as Indianapolis, the rocket jockeys of MotoGP head to the Adriatic Riviera for a little relax e riposo at Misano. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, designed and built primarily for auto racing, took its toll on the two-wheelers, who complained all weekend long about the racing surface and its tendency to dislodge them from their machines. In contrast, Misano is first and foremost a motorcycle circuit, and the average September high temperature in San Marino is in the low 70s. For the riders, it’s like taking a 747 from hell to heaven; if only it were that easy for the rest of us.

Scheduled, as it is, during Indianapolis’ MotoGP weekend, the AMA makes every effort to leverage its lineage with its rich European relatives (though the contrasts could not be starker). Nicky Hayden, sitting on the front row of Sunday’s Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix, had been named Grand Marshall of the Indy Mile this year, and made a surprisingly long and relaxed appearance tonight, as if he really didn’t have anything better to do. After his time on stage, he hung around, gave a few interviews, and took a few laps on Joe Kopp’s Ducati Hypermotard 1100EVO before heading off to God knows where with his posse.

Pedrosa trailed pole sitter Spies for the first six laps before taking him out on lap seven, surprising no one. Four laps later his lead was approaching three seconds and the race was mostly over. Pedrosa’s earlier body of work at Indianapolis had included an eighth place finish in 2008 and a 10th last year, which I took into account when predicting an all- Yamaha podium today. Had he run true to form, my prediction would have been on the money. Instead, it was another of those days – see Laguna Seca in 2009 and Mugello earlier this year – when he was simply untouchable. I don’t like Pedrosa, but I’m starting to respect him.

For Jorge Lorenzo, leading the 2010 MotoGP championship standings by the proverbial country mile, there should be but one objective for the season: keep his M1 upright. He is in the rare and enviable position of being able to win the title by playing it safe. Lorenzo ought to follow the example set last season by teammate and archrival Valentino Rossi who, after winning Round 13 in San Marino, eased up over the last four races and coasted home with the title.

Sixth off the start (since he’d entered too late to get into the start position drawing), Cody quickly found himself the beneficiary of bad luck that struck other Open Pros, and by about pit two the only bike in front of him was the privateer RPP Racing duo of Jerry Parsons and Anthony Westbay.

Prior to digressing about the race and the swirl of events surrounding it, I need to digress about Jorge Lorenzo’s victory celebrations and his growing resemblance to Chad Ochocinco before the NFL outlawed most of his better stuff. Today’s act, for which J Lo successfully arranged a putting green, a putter and a ball, fell a little flat as he missed the 2 foot gimme, with photographers scrambling for The Shot. The idea, however, was hilarious, and, as such, worthy of a 15 yard penalty in the NFL. To its credit, MotoGP can take a joke.

The day before at the opening day of the Summer X Games, Travis Pastrana earned the gold in Moto X Freestyle, surprising the crowd with a double backflip that he didn’t need to attempt since he already had the gold won over Levi Sherwood.

Third place for the 8-bike field was taken without contest by Thijs De Ridder of Belgium, while a battle for fourth through sixth places ensued among Thomas Betti (Italy), Matthias Himmelmann (Germany), and Luciano Betti (Italy). Seventh and eighth were taken by American Mike Hannas, and Christian Amendt of Germany.

We’re happy to report a three-day attendance total of 116,488, a modest but important increase of 10,671 over 2009’s total, especially considering the current economic climate. However, it’s still short of the 140K total from 2008. Laguna’s organizers were happy this year’s event didn’t fall on the Fourth of July weekend as it did in 2009, and it’s expected that the 2011 event will be scheduled around the same timeframe as this year’s July 23-25 date.

Some people will claim Jorge Lorenzo won the 2010 U.S. Grand Prix, while others will say that Dani Pedrosa lost it. To crash out unforced while leading the race, as Pedrosa did, lends credence to the latter opinion. We have observed several times this season that Dani Pedrosa enters each race knowing 1) he has to win, and 2) that he has to be absolutely perfect in order to do so. During the race, we all saw various riders having what the announcers refer to as “moments” – moments when they are not exactly in control of a machine, upon which they are sitting, traveling 150 miles per hour. Ducati’s Casey Stoner had two moments early in the day that may have cost him the race. I recall Dovizioso having several moments as his tires were decomposing late in the day, and Ben Spies had a late one that cost him fifth position. The pressure of having to be perfect caused Pedrosa’s crash today. And it will only get worse from here, as Lorenzo can now play it safe and coast home to the championship.

As the 2010 MotoGP season approaches the halfway point, we who follow the sport closely have learned several things. Yamaha heartthrob Jorge Lorenzo has declared himself the alpha male, but ol’ king Rossi is conceding nothing, even on one leg. Repsol Honda’s Dani and Dovi play hard every time out, and Pedrosa still thinks he can win this thing.

In the ensuing confusion, it appeared that Bautista hit de Puniet’s machine, which burst into flames, while Espargaro hit de Puniet’s leg, breaking two bones, sending the Frenchman to the hospital and bringing out the red flag. Once the cement dust settled, a determined Pedrosa passed Lorenzo on Lap 10 of the second race and won going away. And although it’s not raining on Lorenzo’s victory parade, a few storm clouds are now visible on the distant horizon.

And so it goes. Once Dovi crashed, the race was over, giving Lorenzo three wins in a row, five-wins-in-seven-races for the year, and a 52 point stranglehold on the 2010 MotoGP World Championship. Were he so inclined, which he’s not, Lorenzo could go on holiday today, not return to racing until August 13, and still be in the lead and favored for the championship. Pedrosa, who fought his way back from his early error, finished second again today, garnered another 20 points, and fell further behind Lorenzo. Dovizioso, with the hardest two points he’s ever earned, maintained his firm grip on third place for the year and still leads fourth place Nicky Hayden by 22 points.

With the exception of maybe two guys, the racing world figures Fiat Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo to win the 2010 MotoGP championship. He leads the entire Sioux nation by 47 points after six races, a pace that would clinch the title at Sepang or Philip Island. The aforementioned two guys, incidentally, ride for Repsol Honda. Dani Pedrosa has spoken out, claiming a puncher’s chance of winning, while teammate Andrea Dovizioso, less publicly, believes he can beat Pedrosa which, in turn, implies he can beat Lorenzo. As Round 7 of the 2010 MotoGP season steams into Barcelona, at least one of these two guys needs to put his money where his mouth is.

The MotoGP premier class enters the heart of its 2010 season without the iconic Valentino Rossi, out indefinitely with a bad wheel of his own. In his absence, Rossi’s teammate and archrival Jorge Lorenzo has taken el toro by the horns and staked his claim to the throne, at least for this year. A number of young, fast, aggressive riders, anxious to depose Lorenzo & Company, appear ready to step up and strut their stuff. With five races in six weeks, it’s a great time for one or more of them to get on a hot streak. Lorenzo’s job in all this is to stay smooth and cool.

It was déjà vu all over again today as American Nicky Hayden, riding the factory Ducati, was relegated to bridesmaid status, finishing fourth for the fourth time this year and once again missing out on his first 2010 podium by fractions of a second. Hayden was sitting in third position today, half a lap from the finish line, when Spies, who had started the day in the seven hole, blew by him, this only moments after Hayden himself had gone through on Randy de Puniet. LCR Honda’s de Puniet, who had qualified in the front row and spent all day in the top three (he’d finished third at Donington in his best result of 2009) couldn’t hold off the two Americans in the final lap. I’m not even going to mention how, for the fifth time in five races this season, de Puniet failed to finish higher than he qualified.

Fiat Yamaha superstud Valentino Rossi’s shocking crash and injury at his home Mugello circuit two weeks ago has shifted the balance of power in the MotoGP premier class. While teammate and rival Jorge Lorenzo is now the undisputed heavyweight division favorite, Honda is suddenly the manufacturer du jour, and the fourth member of MotoGP’s perennial Top Four has yet to identify himself. Repsol Honda riders Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso join Lorenzo, for now, as the usual suspects to podium each round. But like an ongoing bridge game at the old folks’ home, this is a group in need of a fourth.

Sunday’s race itself wasn’t particularly exciting, except perhaps in the Repsol Honda garage. Pedrosa is a genuine front-runner, in the worst sense of the term. He invariably gets off to fast starts, the fastest on the grid, looking most weeks like he’s been launched from a catapult. When his bike has the set-up he likes, as it did last year at Laguna Seca and again at Valencia, he’s simply untouchable. When he doesn’t, and things get a little, um, congested in the turns, he fades, as we saw at Jerez and again at Le Mans two weeks ago.

Round Four of the 2010 MotoGP championship season marks the annual pilgrimage to Tuscany, where the storied Mugello circuit once again hosts the Gran Premio d’Italia. Last year, Ducati Marlboro mullah Casey Stoner interrupted Valentino Rossi’s string of seven straight wins at Mugello in a thriller that saw the top five finishers separated by a mere three seconds. This year, Stoner is an afterthought, and people’s attentions are focused on whether Fiat Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo can continue his white-hot 2010 campaign at teammate Rossi’s home track.

The pressure, it appears, was too much for the Australian, as he lost the front end on Lap 2, in a turn my late Aunt Frannie could have navigated with relative ease, were she still with us. He spent the rest of the race in his garage, head in heads, watching as Jorge Lorenzo once again asserted his will on teammate Rossi and the rest of the field and won the Grand Prix de France going away, leaving the last remaining vestiges of Stoner’s 2010 championship dreams shattered on the French tarmac.

It’s an event that sees more than 100,000 enthusiasts in a single day that has top racers clocking speeds in excess of 200 mph. The races take place on public roadways, fraught with the possibility of instant death, and counts one of the most well known names in all of motorcycle racing amongst its ranks. And it isn’t the Isle of Man TT.

Last year, Le Mans hosted Round 4 of the MotoGP world championship chase, a damp, confusing event which Fiat Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo won, while Hayate Racing’s Marco Melandri took second and defending world champion Valentino Rossi finished an angry 16th. Such is not likely to be the case this year, as the Grand Prix de France has moved up into the Round 3 slot; the forecast for Sunday is sunny and mild, with a slight chance of volcanic ash. The question on the minds of most MotoGP fans: is there anyone out there capable of challenging Team Fiat Yamaha this week, or any week in which there isn’t a tropical storm?

The 25-mile  TTXGP competition, in which 12 teams initially entered, 10 started and eight finished, was won by Shawn Higbee on the Zero Agni machine – the same converted GSX-R600 which last June won the Pro Class at the world’s first TTXGP electric motorcycle race held at Britain’s the Isle of Man.

Last January, four of us decided to take a family vacation to southern Spain in early May. I worked out a deal with my editor at Motorcycle.com to pay me handsomely to cover the Gran Premio bwin de Espana, subject to my securing press credentials, providing some extra copy and photos, and giving them way more than my usual vapid kitchen table rant.

Sunday was a perfect day on the dazzling Spanish Riviera. The usual suspects had qualified well on Saturday, led, somewhat surprisingly, by Honda homeboy Dani Pedrosa, who apparently solved the suspension problems that had plagued him all year. Pedrosa was on the pole, followed by Lorenzo, Ducati Marlboro’s Casey Stoner and Valentino Rossi. Nicky Hayden, Randy de Puniet and Colin Edwards completed Tranche One on this round, and it looked as if the long-suffering Pedrosa might enjoy his first day in the sun since his win last year at Valencia.

Early on, one could see this wasn’t going to be no steenkin’ procession. Although Rossi ended up leading 17 of the 22 laps, Dani Pedrosa, Stoner and an ascendant Andrea Dovizioso all enjoyed some time in the lead. At the moment when Stoner lost the front end on Lap 5, Rossi, Pedrosa, Nicky Hayden and Dovizioso were all within 3 seconds of him and within a half second of one another.

With multi-time SX champ Chad Reed also on the sidelines due to injury, it opened up a podium spot in San Francisco for someone else running in the top five, not to mention the implications for the whole series.

In the meantime, sadly, Buell’s parent company Harley-Davidson announced in October the cessation of Buell production as a cost-cutting move. We’ve long been enamored with Buell motorcycles, holding an affinity for the creative American mind of company founder Erik Buell.

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Motorcycle.com will feature over 18 hours of Truman Show-like coverage of the event that will include behind the scenes interviews from the pits with riders and teams, engine teardowns and even promo girls handing out energy drinks! See what goes on behind the scenes with coverage you wont find on Speed TV.

If youre an astute Motorcycle.com follower, youll remember our Recharging TTXGP story, where we caught up with Azhar Hussain of TTXGP during the first round of the North American series at Infineon Raceway. As part of an effort to expand the grid sizes for each event, a new class dubbed E-Superstock was introduced with the help of Kenyon Kluge of Zero Motorcycles.

If I’m one of the 18 or so racetracks on the planet that compete to host MotoGP races, I think I’d try NOT to get scheduled for the last week of the season. Nine years out of ten, it’s not going to be decisive, memorable or even competitive. Take this year, for example. The main event has been decided; we’re here for the undercards, the beer and the babes. And by “here”, I mean my kitchen table on the north side of Indianapolis.

As amazing as MotoGP is on dry pavement, it is even MORE amazing in the wet. Today’s track was very wet, with standing water in some of the turns, after a pre-race downpour delayed things for a half hour. The bikes seem to defy the laws of physics in the turns; I find myself holding my breath watching these races. At Sepang the riders flying down the straights were throwing up rooster tails reminiscent of Miss Budweiser and the unlimited hydroplanes.

It’s Round 16 of the 2009 MotoGP championship season this weekend, and everything’s coming up roses for Fiat Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi. The arithmetic is working for him, the circuit is one of his favorites, and Casey Stoner, his most fearsome rival at this point, is battling Dani Pedrosa for third place.

At Phillip Island, Stoner and Rossi had been fast all weekend, and the pressure was on Lorenzo to come up with race settings that would put him in the mix. In his focus on being up front at the end, he failed, once again, to pay attention to how he started the race. His poor start today led to the brutal lowside in Turn One and probably cost him his shot at the 2009 championship.

At this point in the 2009 season, MotoGP is a delicately balanced mechanism, poised on the outer limits of Newtonian physics, held in a stationary, tourist-friendly earth orbit by the yin and yang of opposing forces. Centripetal vs. centrifugal force. The tendency of a Bridgestone slick to adhere to the track surface vs. the need of the desperate rider to push his machine right up to the very limit of that adhesion. The force generated by having a lead to protect vs. the urgency of having a lead to overcome. Understanding that a 135 mph curve gets its name from the fact that at 136 you crash and at 134 you lose the race.

Fresh off a month’s holiday, MotoGP blows into the Portuguese Riviera for Round 14 of the 2009 season, the launch of a four-races-in-five-weeks sprint to the championship. Fiat Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi, unquestionably the greatest motorcycle rider of his generation, has a virtual stranglehold on the 2009 title, with only the faintest possibility of a challenge coming from teammate and archrival Jorge Lorenzo. The site is the Autódromo do Estoril, the Portuguese counterpart to the Circuit de Catalunya – a little more run down, occasionally windswept, plenty of changes in elevation, and generally kind to Rossi. Last year, rookie Lorenzo won at Estoril, his first premier class win. If Lorenzo is going to keep his 2009 title hopes alive, he must find a way to beat The Doctor on Sunday. His margin of error at this point in the season is zero.

On an idyllic Adriatic afternoon, the 55,000 mostly Italian fans got their money’s worth on the first lap. Homeboy Gresini Honda rider Alex de Angelis, starting from the seven hole, appeared determined to make up some serious ground early on, looking for his second podium in succession after last week’s impressive ride in Indianapolis. Instead, his lowside crash took out Monster Tech 3 Yamaha’s Colin Edwards, who found himself airborne while his now rider-less machine trashed the hapless Ducati Marlboro rider Nicky Hayden. (Edwards and Hayden had been quietly minding their own business when all this occurred, if such a thing can be said about traveling 140 mph on two wheels.)

In yet another blatant display of bad judgment, I invited my wife Nancy to accompany me tonight, starting with a reception hosted by the nice folks at Aprilia. (Despite my lofty status here at Motorcycle.com, she really couldn’t care less about motorcycle racing, or motorsports in general.) I had mentioned to her that prior to the main event there were “several” heats in both (Pro and Expert) classes.

At the Motor Speedway, Rossi had the opportunity to put his rival and the 2009 season on ice. Instead, he crashed out on Lap 9 and watched from his garage as the Spaniard took the checkered flag and breathed new life into his slim title hopes. What was The Doctor thinking?

Even without some contrived “magic number” or the familiar imagery of the fat lady singing, the world seems to have conceded the 2009 MotoGP championship to Fiat Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi. The world, you see, is not dumb. Going into Brno two weeks ago, Rossi had established himself as the odds-on favorite to repeat as the baddest motorcyclist on the planet. His ensuing duel with teammate and rival Jorge Lorenzo, which culminated in Lorenzo’s crashing out and recording an all-she-wrote DNF, effectively turned out the lights on this year’s championship battle. Sure, there are a half dozen more races yet to run this season, including this week’s Indianapolis Grand Prix. But having Rossi up by 50 points with six races left is like trailing Kobe and the Lakers by 16 with four minutes left in the game. You may be able to make it interesting, but they’re not going to make the mistakes that will let you come back. And neither will The Doctor.

This story begins with one of the good guys in our sport/hobby. Paul James isn't just the Director of Product Communications for H-D and Buell, he's also an avid roadracer who campaigns a team in AMA Pro's Sun Trust Moto-GT endurance-racing series. PJ ran a Firebolt XB12R in 2008, but he and teammate Jeff Johnson stepped up to the faster GT1 class in '09 on a Buell 1125R. That left their old XB collecting dust and neglecting potential contingency money. A plan was hatched to round up a couple of journalists to race the XB, affectionately named “Big Chief,” under the team's James Gang/Hoban Brothers Racing banner.

Brno started out like Catalunya, with the Fiat Yamaha teammates running away from the field on hard tires. Lorenzo spent the first 15 laps of the race trailing Rossi, but by less than a second. On Lap 16 he finally got the Italian lined up and passed him. Although the crowd, riveted by Gabe Talmacsi’s battle with Niccolo Canepa for last place (eventually won by the Hungarian) missed the action, the announcers went wild, hoping against hope that Lorenzo could beat Rossi and keep fan interest in the season alive. Moments later, though, Lorenzo was down, out and done, leaving it to the journalists to find story lines capable of keeping MotoGP fans engaged for the final six rounds of the season.

It hasn't played out that way at all. Rossi has been on a tear and has all but lapped the field. Fiat Yamaha teammate Jorge Lorenzo has fallen 25 points behind, which is still 12 points better than Ducati Marlboro's Casey Stoner.

Lost in the sauce of Dovizioso’s inspiring win were great performances by a number of riders, foremost among them American Colin Edwards and LCR Honda’s Randy de Puniet of France, who joined Dovi on the podium. For Edwards, it was his first podium since Assen in 2008, while de Puniet’s top-three finish was his first since Motegi in 2007. Edwards stole second place from de Puniet on the last turn of the last lap, which brought only slightly less joy to his heart than did his pass of Monster Yamaha Tech 3 teammate James Toseland on Lap 17. At age 35, Edwards doesn’t figure to have too many of these outings left in him, and seemed determined to savor this one, unaided by a couple of backhanded compliments from team owner and resident buffoon Herve Poncharal.

As the race was going off, the British announcers alluded, rather ominously, to some “unfinished business” between Fiat Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo, stemming from the last few races. My thought was that it’s “unfinished business as usual” for two of the best riders on earth who have large egos and don’t like one another very much. At times in MotoGP it gets personal, and this was one of those times.

Round 9 of the MotoGP season gets underway this weekend at Sachsenring, in God-knows-where eastern Germany. Nestled in between Leipzig and Dresden, Sachsenring is a small, tight technical circuit with a bunch of left hand turns, such that Bridgestone is bringing its asymmetric rears with them again this week. (You know, the way they should have at Laguna.)  The German circuit appears to set up well for the Yamaha and Honda teams and not so well for Team Ducati. There’s rain in the forecast. All in all, just another riDONKulous race weekend in the unpredictable 2009 MotoGP season.

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It was only eight days ago that Pedrosa took an early exit at Assen and spent the day watching Rossi effortlessly win his 100th Grand Prix race, a turn of events that must have left him nauseated. His practice runs on Friday and Saturday gave no reason to expect much from him today, other than being one of the few riders not to crash in the run-up to the race. At least six riders had accidents this weekend, with Lorenzo ending up being listed as “questionable” on Saturday with a separated shoulder and a contused foot suffered while qualifying on the pole.

MotoGP goes back-to-back this week, directly from a nice, orderly parade in the Netherlands to what is likely to be a dogfight in the hills of coastal California. This week’s venue is the storied Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, home of the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix. (We’re wondering how come Laguna gets the U.S. Grand Prix, while the IMS hosts the un- macho Indianapolis Grand Prix, but we digress.) And while Mr. Rossi is the clear favorite, and deservedly so, there’s little margin for error in Monterey, and there have been surprises here before. At the midpoint of the MotoGP season, the championship is still up for grabs – for now.