P28
WIND
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE
IN
THE
Jorge Lorenzo could be in trouble
if he runs out of engines.
YAMAHA'S
ENGINE WOES
Y
amaha's MotoGP riders are facing the bleak
prospect of pit-lane starts before the end of
the season, with potential durability problems
leaving them running out of the five allocated
sealed engines long before the end of the 18race season.
Not only factory riders Jorge Lorenzo and
Valentino Rossi but also Cal Crutchlow broke
out their fourth of five engines at Catalunya –
not yet one third of the way through the season.
Worse still, each of the factory riders has already lost one engine - officially withdrawn from
service. They are no longer available even for
practice runs.
The opposite is true at Honda. Both factory
riders have yet to use a third engine. The penalty for exceeding the allocation is a start from
pit lane, 10 seconds after the field, which could
prove very costly to Lorenzo's title defense –
and he's already on the back foot. Asked if he
was worried about it, he said: "We have lost
one engine, and we have another in reserve.
If we can find some problems, maybe we can
use it. But even if not, in theory we can finish
the season - if we don't break another engine."
Michael Scott
For the second year in a row, Taylor Robert won the
Prairie Dogs' Last Dog Standing at Glen Helen.
ROBERT SURVIVES
LAST DOG STANDING
T
he Prairie Dog MC played host to the West
Coast's most extreme off-road race, and it
turned out to even more extreme than anyone expected. The third annual Last Dog Standing held at
Glen Helen Raceway in San Bernardino on June 16
was a four-stage race that ran on the most difficult
terrain the facility has to offer.
This year's course was completely new but the
winner wasn't. Taylor Robert was the top rider in
2012 and he did it again this year, topping a very
elite field of only eight riders who qualified for the
final round of action. In order to get there, they had
to run a heat race for gate position, followed by two
separate races, which were designed to weed out
those who couldn't stay within a certain time period. The heat race was a basic GP, well within the
capabilities of most riders, but the next stages got
progressively more difficult.
Robert started off right by winning the morning
race on his Monster Energy Kawasaki KX250F, but
