Which riders were blazing up and smoking the field in Holland? Who munched their way through the whole pack? Find out as we rate the riders on how they performed in the Dutch GP at Assen.
Top ten riders rated out of ten:
Fabio Quartarararo – 10 out of 10
A crushing performance from the quick frog. If he can refrain from going off his nut towards the end of the season this time, and limit the amount of time he spends applying styling wax to his hair, he looks like a shoo-in for the World Championship title.
Maverick Vinales – 9 out of 10
Fast all weekend. Set pole position and followed it up with an excellent second place. Celebrated by dumping Yamaha and probably moving to Aprilia. This kind of behaviour is the reason why the Spanish military have started using Maverick’s MotoGP results as a random number generator for their secure cryptography. The enemy just can’t even begin to guess where Top Gun is going to finish next, so the Spanish soldiers can call their mums and ask for their special paella recipes in perfect secrecy.
Joan Mir – 9 out of 10
A great result given that the Suzuki is currently at a huge disadvantage due to its lack of “pole squat” device. (Hat-tip to Piglet for coming up with that one). With the other bikes having these pole squat devices, their riders are able to explode from the stalls. They then have gushing runs as they skitter into turn one. The leader then trots off into the distance, leaving his rivals straining for the number two slot. The device can then be used on the exit of corners during the race to help riders blast out of corners with their squatting rear. Suzuki should hopefully have their pole squat device ready by the end of the summer break. A date for Mir to put in his diary, eh?
Johann Zarco – 8 out of 10
This race proved that the Stewards Panel live in a parallel universe. When Zarco is innocent of any wrongdoing, they come down on him like a ton of bricks. When he brutally rams somebody off the track and destroys their race (Alex Rins in this case), the Stewards see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Still, it means that Zarco makes it two crazy frogs in the running for the championship.
Miguel Oliveira – 8 out of 10
The Portugee had a horrible start to the season, but is now really getting to grips with the KTM and putting in some solid results. He would pat KTM’s brilliant test rider Dani Pedrosa on the head to praise him for these improvements, but he struggles to bend down that low and wouldn’t want to risk accidentally knocking the little guy unconscious either.
Pecco Bananas – 8 out of 10
Brilliant start to the race, but just couldn’t keep the superior Yamaha-Quartarararo combination behind him. Was then penalized with a long lap penalty because although the Stewards Panel couldn’t see Zarco blatantly torpedo someone, they could immediately see Pecco viciously run about an inch and a half over track limits, not just once but twice!
Marc Marquez – 7 out of 10
It was always going to be a tough race for the octochampion (as they call him in Spain, which is strange as an octopus has 8 arms while Marc has only 1.5 of them) as unlike the Dachshundring, the Assen track has both left and right hand turns. But he continued his gradual recovery with a solid result.
Aleix Asparagus – 7 out of 10
With Pecco, Marc and Aleix crossing the line covered by just over 3 tenths of a second, this 8th place could just as easily have been a 6th. Again, the Spaniard rode well but struggled to battle with the vastly more expensive rival bikes. It’ll be fascinating to see how Aleix does next year as team-mate to the randomly brilliant Vinales.
Taka Nakagami – 6 out of 10
Great performance early on, but his Honda chewed up its rear tyre and spat it out, leaving him losing place after place. While the Honda is notoriously hard to set up and ride, Taka is the guy who set up and rode it so he has to take some of the blame.
Pol Asparagus – 6 out of 10
Keeps getting his butt kicked by his fellow Catalan Marc Marquez, despite having 2 entire arms, unlike his team-mate.
Selected other riders:
Danilo Petrucci – 4 out of 10
Soundly beaten by his team-mate, the likeable lummox will probably be out on his plus-sized backside at the end of the season. Hilariously said that if he doesn’t keep his Tech 3 KTM race seat, he will ask to represent KTM on the Dakar rally. Better start studying for his truck driving license, then.
Lorenzo Savadori – 0.5 out of 1.0
Finished in 16th place just 37.5 seconds behind the race winner, which is a solid result by his standards. Along with Jonathan Rea and, being generous, maybe 2 or 3 other guys from World Superbike, the MotoGP grid represents the best of the best. Savadori shows us what happens if a motorcycle racer who is merely very, very good is dropped into the MotoGP paddock. He gets his ass kicked every time out.
Garret Gerloff – 6 out of 10
It’s always fun to see the over-enthusiastic young Texan bounding around the place like a puppy that hasn’t quite been house trained yet. So likeable that his fellow World Superbike riders struggle to stay angry with him even after he’s torpedoed them off the track. May well show up in MotoGP in a few years time.
Jackass Miller – 3 out of 10
Turn 5 at Assen is always tricky as it’s the first left hander the riders have encountered for a while and the slightest mistake can leave them sliding down the road. Jackass saw Joan Mir shoving his way past Taka Nakagami in front of him, and was so surprised to see the Suzuki overtaking anything that he crashed out of the race.
Valentino Rossi – 3 out of 10
Had a bad start, but made up for it by disappearing off track in a humongous high-speed crash to take his 5th DNF of the season. Seems to be celebrating his end of year retirement by visiting as many gravel traps as possible, a bit like how Horhay Lorenzo kept stomping through gravel traps to plant Lorenzo’s Land flags.
Internet Trolls – 1 out of 10
The interweb’s most hate-filled, imbecilic Rossi and Marquez fans will be weeping bitter tears after the comments section of the Crash website was finally disabled. It had long been the only place on the internet where motorsports “fans” could attack each other with screeching, expletive-laden, vile personal hatred, the kind of raw sewage that you can only get away with on Twitter if you are a blue tick celebrity and are dispensing “Bolivian marching powder” fuelled, bug-eyed rants about You Know Who. Future civilizations will look back and wonder how on earth this decision took so long.