by Tracy Hagen

Former MotoGP world champion Jorge Lorenzo demonstrated that he is ready and able to fight Honda’s Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa in 2012 with a gritty ride to victory in Qatar, the first round of the MotoGP world championship. Lorenzo rode his Yamaha M-1 to a 0.852 second victory over Pedrosa. Reigning world champion Stoner finished third, two seconds behind Pedrosa, and spoke afterwards of suffering from “arm pump” after leading three-fourths of the race.

Indeed, Lorenzo’s competitiveness was plainly evident through all of the sessions leading up to the race as the Spaniard and the Australian took turns bumping each other off the top of the timing monitor with Lorenzo eventually earning pole. By the end of the event Lorenzo erased all doubt regarding the effects of his partial finger amputation near the end of 2011 and shifted the speculation of physical fitness squarely on Stoner.

The Yamaha Tech 3 duo of Cal Crutchlow and Andrea Dovisioso finished fourth and fifth, respectively. The pair raced each other and no one else over the entire race distance, never separated by more than a second, with Crutchlow finishing ahead of Dovisioso by three-tenths of a second.

Interestingly, by looking at the chart below, whenever a small gap existed between Crutchlow and Dovisioso they were nearly on pace with the threesome at the front; however, the closer they raced each other the further behind they fell from the leaders. In the end the finished roughly fourteen seconds behind Stoner.

Behind the Tech 3 twins a bare-handed brawl broke out between Nicky Hayden (Ducati), Alvaro Bautista (Honda), Stefan Bradl (Honda), and Hector Barbera (Ducati). Hayden elbowed ahead of Bautista by just three-hundredths of a second to claim sixth. Rookie Stefan Bradl, who looked nearly good enough to mix it up with Crutchlow and Dovisioso in the first half of the race, was caught and kicked down to eighth by veterans Hayden and Bautista. Hector Barbera finished ninth after taking a gamble on the brakes on the final lap that took him out of contention for sixth.

Valentino Rossi finished a dismal tenth on the Ducati after posting the slowest qualifying time amongst the prototypes. After the race Rossi branded the all-new Ducati as “unrideable,” and the lap times bore this out: Rossi’s best lap over the event was in the third free-practice session at one minute, 56.535 seconds (qualifying was a quarter-second slower, and the best race lap was yet another quarter-second slower than qualifying).

Last year, in his first race for Ducati, Rossi qualified the old 800cc bike at 1:55.637 – a full second and change better than this year’s 1000cc bike. Stoner, by comparison, qualified the 800cc Ducati at 1:55.007 in 2009, 1:55.286 in 2008, and 1:54.733 in 2007. Ouch.

Lorenzo’s teammate, Ben Spies, was the last of the protos to take the checkered flag, in eleventh. The Texan’s explanation for public consumption was “chatter problems.”

The new kids on the block, the CRT teams, were headed by Colin Edwards on the BMW followed by Randy De Puniet on the Aprilia.

Yonny Hernandez, who scrapped up funds to buy a ride on a Kawasaki CRT bike for a few races just a month ago, was first among the no-names by finishing fourteenth, five seconds behind De Puniet.

Though we’re only one race into the CRT era, the superbike-powered prototypes mostly ran around in single file and made a lot of noise. Anyway you looked at this one, the MotoGP regulars put on a far better show.

Next race: Jerez, April 29.