By Dan Moakes
May 25 2013

The 2013 MotoGP World Championship was shaping up into a three-way, all-Spanish affair, with a win apiece for Jorge Lorenzo, Marc Márquez and Dani Pedrosa. 20-year-old class rookie Márquez was marginally ahead, in part thanks to a robust move to end the Spanish GP.

However, it all remained very close at the top of the championship table, with plenty of racing still to come. Starting off with round four, the French Grand Prix at Le Mans. Lorenzo and Pedrosa were tied with three wins each at this venue in past seasons, the same number as Valentino Rossi. Both Márquez and Andrea Dovizioso had also been victorious at Le Mans, with one win each. Only Rossi and Lorenzo had previously won the MotoGP race at the circuit.

Once again, qualifying saw the Honda and Yamaha runners emerge quickest, taking eight of the top nine grid positions. However, only one of the four fastest men was on the Honda RC213V, but that was pole man Márquez on the Repsol-backed factory machine. Team-mate Pedrosa was only sixth after a crash. Yamaha team leader Lorenzo was second, with his team-mate Rossi eighth. The satellite bikes were in the mix, with Tech 3 Yamaha’s Cal Crutchlow and Bradley Smith fourth and ninth respectively, and also Stefan Bradl (fifth for LCR Honda) and Álvaro Bautistá (seventh for Gresini Honda).

The front row was completed by another works machine, Dovizioso taking third place for Ducati. His team-mate, Nicky Hayden, was tenth. Ducati test and wildcard rider Michele Pirro was on this occasion substituting for Pramac team leader Ben Spies and would start from P14, one place behind Pramac Ducati regular Andrea Iannone. But these two were therefore not as fast as the CRT pace setters, Aspar ART riders Aleix Espargaró and Randy de Puniet, in P11 and P12 respectively.

In fifteenth was Héctor Barberá (Avintia Blusens FTR-Kawasaki), then it was Danilo Petrucci (Ioda Suter-BMW), Colin Edwards (Forward Racing FTR-Kawasaki), Karel Abraham (Cardion AB ART), Claudio Corti (also Forward Racing), Michael Laverty (Bird Motorsport PBM-ART), Bryan Staring (Gresini FTR-Honda), Lukáš Pešek (also IodaRacing), Yonny Hernández (Bird Motorsport ART) and Hiroshi Aoyama (also Avintia Blusens).

Crutchlow had suffered an injury with a crash during practice, but wasn’t going to let that stop him racing - although it would emerge that in fact he had a leg fracture. But for the race all the riders had a tricky situation to contend with, as rain set in not long before the off, turning it into a wet race. Pole man Márquez did not have a good opening lap, dropping outside the top eight, soon to run off the track and have to recover. Dovizioso was the man who got away first, followed by Lorenzo, and then it was Pedrosa, Bradl, Hayden, Iannone, Rossi and Crutchlow.

Rossi and Crutchlow began to move forward, with fellow Yamaha man Lorenzo struggling to match them and in fact beginning to go backwards. Initially this left a race for the lead between Dovizioso and Pedrosa, with the pair swapping back and forth through the double right-hander of Virage du Garage Vert. Andrea got back in front of his former team-mate, but in time Dani would get past and take over in first position.

The order behind now saw Rossi leading Crutchlow and Lorenzo, but with Jorge due to lose out to first Bradl and then Márquez, who was running quickly as he recovered from his earlier difficulties. With Crutchlow up to second at the expense of Rossi, Bradl would become the first casualty of the leading runners, sliding off and resuming for the loss of several places. Rossi was next, circulating just in front of fifth man Hayden. The Italian’s Yamaha slid out from under him, but again he was able to continue down the field.

Pedrosa, Dovizioso and Crutchlow were up front, and Márquez soon passed Hayden for fourth at the Virage du Chemin Aux Boeufs, a left-right chicane, with Marc braking on the inside on the way in. The Virage de la Chapelle turn, a looping right-hander, would see Crutchlow move into second on the inside line from Dovizioso; and before long the Ducati man would lose out on a podium result as Márquez got to the inside for the left at Chicane Dunlop, a left-right with fast approach.

By this stage, Lorenzo had also lost out to Bautistá, and this gave a finishing order behind winner Pedrosa of Crutchlow, Márquez, Dovizioso, Hayden, Bautistá and Lorenzo. Prototype bikes filled the top twelve places, with Pirro eighth, then Smith, Bradl, Iannone and Rossi. The CRT finishers were led once again by Espargaró, who was followed by Petrucci, Abraham, Edwards, Laverty, Barberá and Aoyama. The non-finishers were Hernández, de Puniet, Pešek, Corti and Staring.

With Jorge Lorenzo having difficulty in the wet conditions, and with Marc Márquez in recovery mode, it was Dani Pedrosa who moved into the lead of the championship after earning his second win of 2013. It was also a good day for Ducati, with a four-five result for works riders Andrea Dovizioso and Nicky Hayden, the team’s best joint result since the wet race in Malaysia last October. However, particularly notable was Cal Crutchlow’s performance, scoring his best GP result to date despite his leg injury. On a day when Scott Redding became the first British winner in Moto2, one wonders whether Cal might be on course to be the first British winner in the premier class since 1981.

Standings after four races: Pedrosa 83; Márquez 77; Lorenzo 66; Crutchlow 55; Rossi 47; Dovizioso 39; Bautistá 38; Hayden 35; Espargaró 20; Iannone 18 ·· CRT leader: Espargaró.
Honda 91; Yamaha 77; Ducati 40; ART 20; FTR-Kawasaki 7; Ioda Suter-BMW 4; PBM-ART 3.