ROAD RACE
FIM MOTOGP WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
ROUND 11 / AUGUST 21, 2016
AUTOMOTODROM BRNO / CZECH REPUBLIC
P66
A
ll praise for weather. All praise for
history. And all praise for great
motorcycle racing.
There was plenty of all three at Brno,
with surprise winners in all three classes,
and the most unexpected of all in Mo-
toGP, where Cal Crutchlow made a bold
gamble on tires and rode an even bolder
race. He became the first Briton to win
a premier-class grand prix since Barry
Sheene in Sweden in 1981, fully 35 years
ago.
In fact, the LCR Honda rider said it
had been a bit of a cruise. Once he had
charged through to the lead from 15th on
lap one to first on lap 16 of 22 on the ma-
jestic 3.357-mile Masaryk circuit, he was
getting signals from his pit to slow down.
"But when you're already taking it easy,
what are you supposed to do?" he said.
After two days of sunshine, race day
dawned sodden, and it carried on raining
until less than an hour before the start of
the main race of the day. But the track
stayed sodden, and with no previous
wet-race experience here, nobody knew
how quickly the track would dry.
All started on wet tires, with spare
bikes warming up in case of a flag-to-flag
bike swap to slicks.
Crutchlow was already on the grid
when he decided to fit the harder rear.
BY MICHAEL SCOTT
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE
Cal Crutchlow finally broke
the British victory drought in
MotoGP at Brno
ONE FOR
THE RECORD
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