MOTOGP » MotoGP reaches 100

Qatar/2006/Losail Casey Stoner starts from pole in only his second appearance on a MotoGP machine !! With that crap bike!

Fast dude that Stoner as known earlier from 125's & 250's and now in MotoGP. He has long glorious future ahead.

Hope also that Ducati can keep that direction.

Hi Mick - do F1 cars have any similarity to the cars you and I buy for the road?
Other than in a production class, I don't think relevance really comes into it.
You may consider 2 strokes old technology, but the reality is that if the development of 2 strokes had continued in parallel with the 4 strokes, introducing all the various electronics and rider aids, then a 500cc 2 stroke would completely smoke an 800 or even a 990 for that matter.
I supposed I'm nostalgic though - I raced TZ250 & 350 Yamahas, and owned an RD400, Kawa500 triple, and Suzuki 750 triple, all of which I loved to bits. Somehow, four strokes just seem to lack the same 'soul'. Ah well.

Just Say No to traction control!!! See how the kids do without it!!!

Not disagreeing Lann, last model TZ I had was a Japanese championship spec U model, what a brilliant weapon it was though yours truly was struggling with age and radial tyres at the time.

They had to kill off the 2 strokes, the technology improvements I'm sure too would see them faster than the 4 strokes and much kinder to tyres at the end off race distance.

MotoGP is not unfortunately not just for racers to watch, it's for the general public and environmental regs put strokers to the sword so joe-blow has to ride a 4 stroke these days.

Anyway, the weekend is here, time to get the CR500 out while I can still kickstart it.

It wasn't just the tree-huggers and commercial interests that killed off the strokers. Another major factor was that the 500cc 2-stroke engine had reached somewhere around 98% of its maximum potential and the 4-stroke superbikes would have beaten them.