2009 Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix

Valentino Rossi makes it seem so effortless. While going stupendously quick. I am thoroughly impressed.

A win by Australian Casey Stoner on the Ducati in his home grand prix. Seems to be a good weekend for Australia, with Mark Webber winning in Brazil a few hours ago.

Valentino Rossi in 2nd. Rossi's closest title rival, and also his teammate, Jorge Lorenzo crashed out, after running into Nicky Hayden on the first corner of the first lap. Oh, sorry. Yor-geh. I guess he was pooooshing too hard.

And everyone's favorite Frenchman, Randy de Puniet in 8th.

Quite good race at the front between Rossi and Stoner. Great ride by Stoner.

And with Yor-geh's crash today, and Rossi's second place, it means that Rossi now leads Lorenzo in the world championship by 38 points, with 2 races remaining. Now if MotoGP used a similar scoring system to Formula 1, this would be an unassailable lead, and Rossi would already have cliched the championship. But, instead of gaining 10 points for a win, as in Formula 1, the winner of a MotoGP race gets 25 points. So, basically, Yor-geh is playing the role of Vettel in this series. And look how that turned out. Rossi needs to score 13 points total in the next two races. So, that's one 4th place finish, or one 10th and one 9th. And considering, he's only finished off the podium 4 times this season, it seems rather likely that he'll be world champion again. This year, he's finished on the podium 11 times thus far, once in 4th, once in 5th, once in 16th, and he's crashed out once. Oh, and I should probably mention that Rossi's already won 6 MotoGP championships. Athough, lets hope I'm not jinxing it...

And during the podium interview/speech/thing, while Stoner was talking, Rossi stuck his head into the shot, grinned, and waved to the camera... And that's one of the reasons why I'm a Rossi fan. He's just got his head screwed on straight, and just tries to have fun. And I really can't complain about someone randomly inserting themselves in to pictures where they don't belong, while grinning like an idiot?

Valentino Rossi Speech Checklist:
Well, shit. He didn't say any of the 3 catch-phrases. He did mention Yor-geh's crash, but either he horribly mispronounced his teammates name, or referred to him by some very strange nickname that I really didn't understand.
Today he seemed to be "attacking" rather than "poooshing".