Repsol Honda's Dani Pedrosa was left with a comparatively easy cruise to victory in today's Motegi MotoGP round when race leader Casey Stoner was forced off track with brake issues after a tank slapper and a catalogue of crashes, including Valentino Rossi, and ride-throughs played havoc with the natural order.
Marlboro Ducati's Rossi was the first man to go down, getting nudged by Jorge Lorenzo which caused him to ride into the second factory Yamaha of Ben Spies. The number 11 bike was able to re-join but The Doctor was left to trudge back to his pit garage to contemplate what could have been.
And contemplate he would as, on lap four, Stoner's bike tied itself in knots coming over the hill knocking the front brake pads back in the calipers which left the 2007 world champion with no stopping power and he had to run into the gravel, re-joining in seventh.
Stoner's problem left Andrea Dovizioso in the lead but the smile was wiped off his face when, on the next lap, he, Marco Simoncelli and Cal Crutchlow all took a ride-through penalty for jumping the start which cost them around 30 seconds and left Pedrosa with the lead, Lorenzo second and Rizla Suzuki's Alvaro Bautista third.
Nicky Hayden had inherited fourth place with all the shenanigans but Stoner was past the 2006 world champion by lap ten. The American then promptly ran off the track as Stoner went under Bautista for third and immediately gapped the Spaniard. Bautista was still on for the best result of the year until he lost the front going the last fast left-hander, but walked away.
All this left Dovizioso and Simoncelli to, somehow, fight it out for fourth place despite having been down pitlane. After swapping paint and places, the large-haired Italian just pipped his lifelong rival by a little over a tenth of a second.
Spies, who has been ill all weekend, managed to get back into sixth place after passing Hayden and Colin Edwards in the last couple of laps while Hiro Aoyama and Randy De Puniet rounded out the top ten. Cal Crutchlow finished in 11th. Mapfre Ducati's Hector Barbera was another crasher and he has been taken to hospital with concussion and a suspected broken right collarbone.
