Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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VOL. 53 ISSUE 14 APRIL 12, 2016 P119 hopes of the whole Italian team for a classic double podium finish. This was, of course, hilarious, among other things, including possibly tragic. Nobody laughed harder than Rossi, who'd been well out- gunned by the big-power Dukes. The bikes, remember, on which he was never able to win a race. He was promoted to second place. Miles behind, Pedrosa got his pay-back—third. The loss to Ducati and to the eminently safe and sensible Dovi was severe. He'd have gotten second, as he had in the first round at Qatar. This would have put him only one point behind title leader Marquez. It was, for Iannone, the fourth race in a row that he has failed to finish. In Malaysia last year he suffered a mechanical failure, but at Valencia and then this year at Losail—crash, and crash again. These are bitter statistics, and his red-on-red Argentine attack could prove costly in more ways than just the loss of points. With Lorenzo considering a big Ducati offer, both he and Dovi are riding to keep their jobs. The last few races make it look as though the younger rider has reverted to his bad old ways. A reversal indeed. Last year, he had seemed a reformed char- acter. I was impressed enough to put him fifth in my personal top 10 table. Iannone crashed only five times in 2015, a radical improve- ment. Over the previous two seasons he had chalked up 12 and 14 crashes, near the top of the charts. (By comparison, last year's biggest numbers came from de Angelis with 19, and Jack Miller with 18—perhaps excusable in a rookie fresh up from Moto3. Marquez recorded 13, Rossi and Lorenzo just two and three respectively.) Iannone is an entertaining character without really trying. His responses to me in a recent inter- view were more off-hand than off the cuff, but still make me laugh and are worth repeating. He was reluctant to speak and I was reduced to asking questions like: "What do you do during the off-season?" "I train. And I f---," he replied. "Sometimes I train, and some- times I f---." This hardly seemed more promising, but we pressed on. "Do you have just one girlfriend, or many?" His deadpan reply was worthy of Groucho Marx: "I don't know." A well-timed pause. "I have to make a phone call." He insists that his self-inflicted "Maniac" tag is not, as you might have suspected, anything to do with his riding or notoriously forceful tactics, but, in fact, an ironic tribute to his OCD passion for orderliness, especially in his pit box. It may have lost some- thing in the translation. Endearing humor, however, plays no part in racing. Nor is it a team sport. It a tru- ism, and by now also a cliché, that your teammate is always the first person you have to beat. But not like that. And especially not, as team boss Paolo Ciabatta said, at only the second race of the season. It might be different if you were going for the cham- pionship at the final round, but not now. So what next? Will he calm down? Or spiral off like just another crash happy speed- struck…err, maniac? Kinder, perhaps, to say it's just another demonstration of how close to the edge all of them are living. That's MotoGP right now. Fast. Close. And more than slightly scary. Proper motorbike racing. CN Andrea Iannone PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE