Before he binned it on a damp track, Bradley was joint most frequent faller in the 125cc class from another Brit, Danny Webb on the DeGraaf Aprilia. Now Danny is left in second place with 12 crashes (and we’re only halfway through the tenth round of the year, I remind you).
Amongst the
MotoGP runners,
Randy de Puniet is top of the crashers’ league, with 14 incidents on the LCR Honda.
Alex de Angelis is runner-up with ten falls from the San Carlos Gresini Honda.
James Toseland, who came off his Tech 3 Yamaha yesterday, has fallen nine times so far this year.
The king of all crashers though, comes from the 250cc class. Mattia Pasini, the 22-year-old Italian, has laid his Polaris World Aprilia down 15 times. Polaris World again: their carbon-fibre supplier must love this team…
There are two ways to look at crashing. Some in the paddock say that great riders of the future often crash a lot before they become champions. They point to ferocious competitors such as
Casey Stoner and Mick Doohan.
On the other hand, the frequent fallers have to decide at some stage
not to keep losing it, or they’re never going to win championships. I side with the latter view.
Saturday am - Kawasaki: ‘We Have a Third Bike if You’ve Got the Money’
"We have the bikes, and we have the infrastructure and the people to run three bikes, but we will not pay for the third bike ourselves."
That’s the verdict of Kawasaki’s communications manager Ian Wheeler on the wave of rumours swirling through the MotoGP paddock that the Japanese company is about to add
Marco Melandri, disillusioned at Ducati, to its rider line-up.
Asked directly if Kawasaki were planning to take on the Italian, Wheeler said: "If for whatever reason he ends up not riding for Ducati, we would be interested in him riding one of our bikes. But it’s completely a Ducati matter and not something for us to have any involvement in at the moment."
