MotoGP 2005 - Round 6

Racing superstar Valentino Rossi continued to prove his dominance with a hard-fought victory over favored son Sete Gibernau in the Catalunya GP at the Montmelo Circuit north of Barcelona. With nearly 106,000 enthusiastic Spaniards watching, Rossi passed Gibernau three laps from the end and eased out to a 1.094 second victory on the fast and flowing Catalunya circuit.

Rossi has been so dominant this year that it prompted Marco Melandri, third today and a distant second in the championship, to all but concede the title.
"I don't want to think about the championship because I think the battle for the championship will be between Valentino and Rossi for sure," the young Italian said with a laugh.

The podium trio dominated the race from the start, which featured aggressive riding among the top six right to the end. Rossi's first turn at the front was on the sixth lap, then it went to Gibernau to the delight of his hometown crowd. The Spaniard kept his Italian rival at bay until lap 23 of 25 when Rossi drafted by on the long front straight.

The lap would be the fastest ever race lap at Catalunya and it was done on well worn tires. "Is incredible the rhythm, 43.2 to the end," Rossi said after his fourth win in a row, fifth in six races this year. "Last year maybe the last lap we do 45-high. Is more than two seconds faster, so Michelin did a great job with the tire that resists to the end."

Rossi's lead grew to 68 points, 145 to 87, over Melandri with 11 races to run.

The Proton KR, powered by KTM, couldn't continue on the progress made last week in Mugello. Only seven days earlier, Byrne had ridden hard to come within one position of a championship point. Today, in the baking sun and on a track surface that abuses tires, Byrne again finished sixteenth, but the Englishman wasn't pleased.

"I'm nowhere near as happy with that sixteenth as I was with the one last week in Mugello," Byrne said after finishing 11 seconds short of catching Kenny Roberts Jr. on the factory Suzuki for the final championship point.

This was the second race for the latest version of the V4 motor, but, unlike last week, when it was 11th fastest of the 21 entries, this week the motor didn't have the torque to move Byrne forward. "That was a tough old race, that's for sure," Byrne said. "It was going to be a long race no matter what happened because we'd been searching for a feeling since Friday morning and just not finding it. "The problem we've got with this bike at the moment is we don't have enough grunt off of the turn. The engine doesn't push the bike forward enough as soon as I touch the throttle. In Mugello, we found a real good front setting that allowed me to run quite a lot of corner and be on the gas right on the side of the tire, get initial drive, rather than relying on how you should ride the thing, which is get into a corner, get it squared off, pick the thing up, and then grunt it out."

But Byrne wasn't discouraged and looked forward to the Dutch TT at Assen in less than two weeks time. It's unfortunate, but we're just going to have keep working as hard as we can. I'll never stop trying as hard as I can and hopefully the combination will come a little bit better and we'll start scoring some points."

The answers could come as soon as the return of the U.S. GP at Laguna Seca on July 10.

"All we're going to do now is finish," team owner Kenny Roberts, who had some of his greatest races at Laguna Seca, said. "That's all we can do. Until we can improve the performance of the vehicle, that's all we can do. I hope around Laguna we'll get better. That's my hope. I think they're on it, but I don't have a time schedule for when it's actually going to start appearing."

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