Who do you want as a teammate, Dani Pedrosa or Gábor Talmácsi?

We arrive in Portugal with Hayden realistically needing to beat Rossi in order to retain the upper hand in the championship. Sure he is 12 points ahead of Rossi, so if he comes second to him at these final two races, he'll hold on, but in reality, he needs to stop the slide that has seen him score just 42 points in the 4 races after his win at Laguna. In that same time, Rossi has been on the podium at every race to collect 81 points. On top of that, Estoril is a track where Nicky does not have an impressive record. But after being fastest in one of the practice sessions and qualifying 3rd to Rossi's 1st, it looked like it could be a tight tussle. After a few laps, it looked like it was going to be a battle between the two main championship contenders and their respective teammates. Noone, especially Nicky, could have guessed what would happen on lap 5. Pedrosa got into turn 6 (the left at the end of the back straight) too deep, had nowhere to go, and took out his teammate and championship leader, Nicky Hayden.

This race also saw Garry "Gazza" McCoy return to MotoGP aboard Mario Illien's Ilmor 800. Garry qualified last, but I'm sure the team will be happy that the bike made it to the end of the race. Another interesting aspect to this race was Elias being bonus rider. I have noticed that many times the bonus rider/driver will normally either not finish the race or get a much better result than normal. This was definitely the case for Toni. He was very fast and came from 11th on the grid to win by just 0.002 seconds. Sometimes, when a rider doesn't qualify well they might find a good setup late and be one of the faster riders in Sunday warm-up... not so for Toni, he was 16th in the warm-up... So you may be wondering where this speed came from, I know I am... but I have a theory... it's called the Barry Sheene presents Channel Ten Bike Commentators' Theory on Dud Riders. It is: they go better at their home track and when it's "contract time"... Well there may be something in this, because I have just read on motogp.com that Toni has re-signed with Fausto Gresini for next year. In other silly season news, it looks like Casey Stoner will replace Gibernau at Ducati and Checa will replace Casey at Honda LCR.

To the underSteer battle, and the race was won by circumfrential groove. This is his second win of the year and moves him to just 14 points behind Eyes of the Dragon in the battle for fourth. Rounding out the podium was The X Factor and The Chuckster. At the top of the table, Gibernever has increased his lead to 29 points over Carlotta and, barring anything strange happening at the last race, is looking very good to add the motogp championship to his f1 title. Perhaps the only chance for Carlotta is to enter some "weird picks" and hope for rain of something of the sort and this might be an option since Carlotta has an unsurpassable 72 point lead over third placed Sennamental Favourite. I'm interested to see what will happen here. It comes down to this: Does Carlotta want to go for the title or is she happy to come second as long as she gets as many points as possible. Carlotta says that she always looks at the results at the end of the year, not round wins, or top tens, or anything else, but we'll see... I suspect she'll play it safe, and just settle in for second.