Dani Pedrosa triumphs at Indianapolis

2010 Indianapolis GP Dani Pedrosa podium

Dani Pedrosa celebrates his victory

Race:

With seven rounds to go Dani Pedrosa closed the gap to the championship leader to 68 points. By winning the 11th round of the season at Indianapolis Pedrosa will still try and run for the World Champion’s crown. All eyes are now on who takes victory at Misano next week.

Dani Pedrosa

Dani Pedrosa lived-up to his name of being the best off-the-line at the lights. Dani showed great pace early on and by lap2 was in second place behind Spies. On the seventh lap of the race, Pedrosa passed Spies and stayed in the lead till the end. Eventually, Pedrosa crossed the line 3.575sec clear of Spies.

Championship leader, Jorge Lorenzo followed in third completing the podium. Having had a bad start to the race Lorenzo recovered and finished the race 3sec off Spies as his phenomenal record of having placed in the top two in every race this season was finally broken.

Jorge Lorenzo

Rossi, Dovzioso and Hayden finished fourth, fifth and sixth respectively. Rookies Marco Simoncelli and Álvaro Bautista impressed with seventh and eight places respectively, with Aleix Espargaró and Héctor Barberá completing the top ten.

With Indianapolis in the bag Pedrosa is now on 183 in second and Lorenzo moves onto 251 points in the standings. Dovizioso is third on 126, with Stoner now seven points behind in fourth. Rossi remains in fifth while Spies moves up to sixth.

Ben Spies

Qualifying:

Ben Spies earned his second pole of the season at Indianapolis this weekend much to the joy of his home crowd. The rookie posted a best time of 1’40.105. Spies’s weekend couldn’t get better with the confirmation of his factory ride for 2011.

Nicky Hayden

Championship leader Jorge Lorenzo on his factory Yamaha M1 was 0.220sec slower than the American rookie while Nicky Hayden took his first front-row place in third.

Andrea Dovizioso with his time of 1’40.559 was placed fourth followed by his team-mate Dani Pedrosa in fifth. 0.559sec off-pace was Casey Stoner who secured sixth.

Valentino Rossi and Andrea Dovizioso

Valentino Rossi crashed at turn six with just over 5mins to go. This meant Rossi would start the race in seventh followed by Simoncelli who also happened to crash during the closing stages of the qualifying session.

Image courtesy: Motogp