Michelin's disastrous weekend continued unabated at Brno today with the firm only having one man in the top ten and its impressive range of reigning and former world champions languishing at the bottom of the result sheet.

Andrea Dovizioso was ninth, 40 seconds behind race winner Valentino Rossi, while Texas Tornado Colin Edwards, a former World Superbike champion, was a full minute and 21 seconds adrift of The Doctor.

And had the race been run for much longer, Repsol Honda's Dani Pedrosa would have been lapped – although he is still carrying injuries from his massive crash at the German round it doesn't bode well.

Bridgestone-shod Rossi spent most of the race lapping a good half-second faster than his nearest rivals, albeit on the same tyres, but the lap charts will make painful reading for Michelin boss Jean-Philippe Weber.

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Edwards said: "We need big improvements from Michelin. The good start we had to the season seems like a long way away now, and we have to work with Michelin to try and solve some of the issues because I didn’t enjoy today at all.

"I could see straightaway behind James that he was having some issues with the front tyre, which we expected. I still thought I could put a good pace together but it never happened. I just didn’t have the confidence I needed to push harder with the tyres and the more I pushed I didn’t seem to go much faster.

"James was able to leave me pretty easily as my issues started to get worse but I wanted to stay out there and try my best for my guys at Tech 3 and Yamaha, who as always have been working like crazy to help me this weekend. I thank them for that, but there was nothing else I could do. Towards the end I just decided to take a few more risks and I went a bit quicker, but there was no way I was going to catch anybody.

"I’ve had a bad run lately but I’m still in contention for fourth in the championship, and I’ll keep fighting."

Britain's Toseland added: "I was reasonably happy with my start but I had a few moments with the front tyre on the first couple of laps and I soon realised that I was at my maximum and that I wasn’t going to be able to do much more.

"It is disappointing because I have slipped out of the top ten in the standings and that was one of my big goals before the start of the season. We have got to keep working hard as a team and hope that Michelin can quickly turn it around for the rest of the season so we can try and get back into that top ten and keep the morale up of the team. Colin had even more problems than me so it must have been tough for him, but this is the situation we are in."
Tech3 team boss Herve Poncharal had hoped for improvements after Laguna, but was disappointed. “We thought the disappointment of Laguna Seca would be forgotten after the summer break and we would have a positive weekend in Brno," he said.
"Unfortunately from the very beginning of the weekend we understood it was going to be another tough weekend. Clearly we couldn’t challenge the tyre opposition. We have been trying a lot of different settings to try and cope with that, but it was difficult.
"The most difficult was qualifying in the rain conditions and we were far behind. We knew starting from the last two rows it would be a tough race but James and Colin still tried as hard as they could and they stayed on track and scored a few points. But this is not how we started the championship and today was a really difficult day. To see the chequered flag with a few points is a relief but for sure there will be a lot of meetings and a lot of thinking of what to do for the future because we keep on losing ground in the championship and this is very disappointing.”

JiR Honda's Dovizioso said: ”My goal for the race was to be the first Michelin rider home, which is what I have achieved, but things were too difficult to do better. I started fully motivated and wanting to give the maximum and exploit fully the material at our disposal, but today I cannot be satisfied with the result.

"I had difficulty with the front tyre and was forced to change my style of riding, which meant not being able to exploit my speed in the corners. I had to stop hard and fire the bike out of the corners, rather than have a smoother style. This difficulty penalised us in the race.”

Fiat Yamaha's Jorge Lorenzo said that although his front tyre was dreadful, the rear started to come to him towards the race end, allowing him to make up some places and gain valuable points.

“I think we have done almost as much as we could. At the start I didn’t want to take too many risks and I could feel that the front tyre was getting worse on each lap, but on the other hand the rear tyre was getting better each lap! I know that we have had had problems this weekend but I know that Michelin are working very hard, so now we will try to use the test to make some improvements."
Michelin's Weber said: "We knew it was going to be extremely difficult for our riders because we have struggled with front-tyre performance since Friday. We therefore knew that our riders would really struggle with the front tyre during the race. Now we need to understand the problems we faced here, where we also struggled last year. We have to make a big improvement to our performance at tracks like Brno. Now we will do our maximum to prepare in the best way possible for the next race at Misano, which is a different track and a different challenge.”