The night the lights went out on Jorge in Argentina
With Boris Mihailovic
It must have been very weird for Jorge Lorenzo to find himself starting from Columbia at the Argentine Grand Prix. Well, maybe not quite Columbia, but it might as well have been – 16th on the grid is not where Lorenzo is used to finding himself.
Similarly, Karel Abraham must have wondered what the hell he was doing at the pointy end in second, bracketed by Marquez on pole and a bewildered Crutchlow scratching himself in third. Behind them sat Petrucci, Pedrosa and Vinales, with Rossi in seventh, after having pulled yet another rabbit out of his bottomless hat for his 350th MotoGP start.
Rossi, Pedrosa and Lorenzo had found themselves in the wastelands of QP1, and while the first two managed to lever themselves into a damp QP2, and ultimately somewhere less shameful on the grid, Lorenzo just couldn’t find anything. But he now knew what it said on the back of Scott Redding’s leathers.
To make things even weirder, Argentina was in the grip of a nation-wide industrial dispute, which saw Michelin’s new tyres sitting in a shed at the airport instead of in a shed at the Termas De Rio Hondo track. The only face smiling at the red start light was Marquez, but even that was short-lived.
In the rush to the Turn One, Iannone jumped the start, Lorenzo nailed him from behind and went to off into the gravel to yell at his Ducati, his life and his career-choices. The Maniac sailed on, only to be forced in for a ride-through penalty a few laps later, which he thought was a bit unfair, given how Lorenzo had run into him at Turn One.
“My feeling is that it was too harsh,” he lamented after the race leaving his team boss to explain to him how this ‘jumping the start’ business actually worked.
Iannone was having none of that. “In my opinion I didn’t gain any advantage because I just moved a bit but then immediately stopped. On the contrary, I also got hit by another rider at corner one, causing me to lose many positions. We deserve better results.”
It is certain that Lorenzo also feels this way, but it’s hard to make sense of all the screaming at Ducati HQ. Meanwhile, having started like a missile, Marquez was leading Crutchlow, Vinales and Rossi, as Karel came to his senses and apologetically worked his way back to his normal racing possie somewhere around 14th.
Zarco was in sixth and closing as the opening laps started to claim more scalps, and Parc Firme echoed with the shrieks of the Spartan whose championship hopes were being crushed on a lap-by-lap basis out on the track where he was not racing. Then Marquez, pushing hard out the front, went down in Turn Two. And suddenly it was Vinales, Crutchlow and Rossi.
With 15 laps left to run, Zarco was showing Petrucci and Pedrosa a clean pair of French heels, and Dani fenced with Petrux for a lap or two before setting off after the Frenchman. Turn Two then claimed the second Repsol Honda on the following lap, while Turn One put paid to Dovi and Asparagus A a lap later.
With almost two-thirds of the race run, Vinales was not going to be caught, and Rossi was clearly not prepared to settle for third. The Doctor pursued Crutchlow with relentless malice and clear intent. Behind the leading three, a fast-moving Bautista was establishing himself in fourth, while Zarco, Petrucci and Jonas Folger amused themselves for fifth, ahead of Redding and Miller.
In the closing stages of the race, Vinales was almost three seconds ahead of Rossi, who had relegated Cal to the bottom step of the podium, and filled Lin Jarvis’s heart with even more joy.
No Yamaha had won the opening two races of a season since Wayne Rainey’s double back in 1990, and while we were denied the Marquez-Vinales duel we all wanted to see on this occasion, Texas is next.
And it’s going to be massive, and not just because everything is bigger in Texas – but because Lorenzo is in 18th place in the championship standings. And that’s got to be stinging.
