At Laguna Seca we saw a truly great race between Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner but for me the memory that sticks most from the weekend was seeing Dani Pedrosa travel home injured on Saturday. It was a disheartening sight for MotoGP fans and it capped off a disastrous week for the Spaniard, who led the World Championship going into the race in Germany but now trails by 41 points.

It shows how quickly things can change in racing, a phenomenon we had already noted, in a more positive fashion, by the change to Stoner’s electronics in the Barcelona test last month. That had allowed Casey to dominate pretty much every practice session and race leading up to Sunday and it enticed me to bet $100 against Valentino winning the USGP!

Unfortunately I lost it but it was a small price to pay for a great spectacle. Laguna Seca is a racetrack that creates atmosphere. I wouldn’t want to go to dangerous tracks every week to create that kind of excitement but it holds true that they seem to produce the better shows.

With seven races remaining it is going to be very difficult for Casey to catch Valentino in the championship. If you go by the way the standings are right now, mathematically speaking Casey could win the next five races and go into his home round at Phillip Island level on points with Valentino. That depends on Valentino finishing second, of course, and a lot of things can happen in five races but the problem for Casey could be that Dani is the only rider who looks capable of splitting the two at the front. After his crash on Sunday Jorge Lorenzo needs to go back to school and when you look down the list of the other contenders it would take something to go badly wrong for Valentino to finish behind any of them.

Dani will be back for the next round at Brno on August 17th but the biggest inconvenience for him between now and the end of the season is not his fitness – it’s his tyres. Michelin had an awful weekend at Laguna, with Andrea Dovizioso their top rider in fourth place. That was a great effort from Andrea on his first visit to the track but generally speaking throughout the weekend there was an unacceptable difference in the performance of Michelin’s tyres compared to Bridgestone. They screwed up, they know it, and they have to make it up to their riders before the season’s out.

Like most fans I’ll be counting down the days to Brno and hoping that we don’t have to wait another ten races for another battle like Laguna. If we’re lucky it will be just three weeks.