4 into1 Doesn’t Go: Valencia Turn One MotoGP Pileup in Pictures

If you were hoping that Ducati would salvage at least something out of the final round of the 2011 MotoGP season at Valencia you had cause for enthusiasm during practice. Randy De Puniet almost put the Pramac Ducati on the front row whilst Valentino Rossi equaled his best ever qualification in 6th, with team mate Nicky Hayden right behind him. Then the race started.

It is a marvel that somehow the hordes of Moto2 bikes can manage to negotiate the first turn of a race but the thinning MotoGP field finds it so challenging (see also Motegi). All three aforementioned Ducati pilots could have had a legitimate expectation of a chance at a podium finish but their hopes would turn out to be dashed by yet another podium hopeful, Alvaro Bautista.

Bautista managed to outbreak himself heading into turn one for the first time and clipped the back of Andrea Dovizioso’s Honda. Now there is one rule that every racer knows and it is this. In a contest of space that involves contact, it is the bike making contact with the front tire that invariably goes down.

And so it was. Alvaro fell and his Suzuki neatly skittled, Vale’s factory Ducati which in turn made a Marlboro Ducati sandwich out of De Puniet’s Pramac bike as he was squeezed between Rossi and Hayden.

All four fell with Nicky coming out the worst for wear in what would turn out to be a fracture of his right scaphoid. This is a notoriously difficult injury to heal and he will undergo surgery soon in an attempt to accelerate the recovery. As a consequence he missed the post season Valencia test.

In a twist of fate, the failure of Rossi and Hayden to finish the race meant that Marco Simoncelli posthumously finished the season in 6th place on 139 points, the same as Valentino, his close friend.