It was great to finally get back to the track after the volcano in Iceland decided all of us MotoGP fans should take a three week break! One thing the Jerez race showed me is that sometimes in racing, the more things change the more they stay the same.

We still have the Fiat Yamaha’s doing well, now with one win each. HRC continue to have the opposite problem, with one rider being able to dial in their bike while the other struggles. And over at Ducati they are still showing better all round performance yet coming away from the weekend with fewer points than they were hoping for. At the same time the Moto2 race was a complete turnaround from Qatar, living up to the hype with some excellent racing and plenty of thrills and spills.

Jorge was brilliant and whatever magic setup he found was his alone as that wall between 99 and 46 means that no information is shared. Will this hurt Yamaha in the long run? Maybe, but if the results keep coming perhaps management won’t be too bothered. As well as setup issues, Valentino was speaking a lot about his injury but I am sure he is happy with the result as it could have been a lot harder had Motegi gone ahead.

At HRC, it was Dani Pedrosa’s turn on the podium, riding a great race in front of his home crowd and Dovizioso having to take the seat at the back of the class. The performance of the RC212V is there but it seems it is very particular to setup right, though one positive to come out of the weekend is that both Marco’s on the Gresini bikes were more competitive so maybe Honda are taking steps in the right direction which is great for the championship as a whole.

Both Nicky and Casey were in the top five and having both bikes performing can only be a good thing for Ducati. While riders in the other top teams are going head to head, there are no secrets in the Ducati garage and each rider has a lot of data to rely on when determining the bike’s setup. The end result is that along with the new, improved GP10, at Jerez the team did well at a track they have struggled at and they’ll be even stronger at the circuits they have dominated previously.

I was watching the MotoGP race from the Tech 3 Yamaha hospitality up until about 8 laps to go and then I had to drop off Bradley Smith at the front gate on the scooter. As we were heading out we could hear the Spanish crowd going crazy so we knew that Lorenzo had just passed Vale.

What surprised me was that by the time I dropped Brad off and came back to Alpinestars’ hospitality to watch the end of the race, not only had Lorenzo got past Rossi but had caught up to Dani. To me it looked like the advantage Dani had at the start of the race coming out of the corners was no longer there and seeing what was happening, I light-heartedly said ‘I wonder if the Honda is running out of fuel?’ I didn’t think that much of it until the next day when I had a call from a friend of mine, Dennis Noyes.

Dennis - whose son; Kenny was leading the Moto2 race for long periods – went down to the Jerez test on Monday asked Dani Pedrosa why Jorge was able to catch up to him so quickly. It turns out that towards the end of the race, a sensor on the number 26 bike detected the bike was running out of fuel so the engine management system leaned out the mixture to make sure Dani could finish.

This made the power delivery on Dani’s bike more ‘peaky’, making it more difficult to ride right at the time when Lorenzo was bearing down on him. Dani admitted that it would have been hard to stop Jorge getting past in any case, but his job wasn’t made any easier by having a bike that wasn’t 100%.

So why did this happen? Well despite Dani complaining about his chassis on Saturday, at the start of the race he was flying so maybe the traction control was working overtime to compensate for the lack of grip. While the TC cuts the ignition to stop drive getting to the rear wheel, there is still raw fuel being dumped into the cylinders which hurts fuel consumption and this may have been what tripped the sensor. Dani couldn’t give Dennis an exact answer on what the problem was, as quite simply he didn’t know! This is another legacy of this age of electronics as it is such an art for the engineers to set up all the systems on the bike that sometimes not even the rider knows what’s going on, quite a change from when I was racing!

In my previous column I mentioned that Jerez would be a true reflection of the Moto2 class and the guys certainly didn’t disappoint. As I knew they would, the riders left nothing back in the garage with lots of guys swapping paint in what was much a test of bravery as it was of skill. And trust me; there will be many more battles like this during the rest of the season!

Toni Elias won on his Gresini Moriwaki and went a long way to banish his disappointment after losing his MotoGP ride last year, Tomizawa continued his good form and the Moriwaki chassis further proved its worth with Thomas Luthi taking 3rd place. The thing that impressed me the most though was we had nine different chassis makers in the top ten, split by just seven seconds and the racing was a great spectacle for the fans and showed what this class can deliver in terms of entertainment.

At the next race it will be interesting to see if both HRC guys can perform and if Ducati get on to the podium for the first time this season. Don’t forget that Le Mans was where we had a wet start to the race last year with Rossi crashing and Melandri on the podium with the Hayate so anything can happen!

Randy