Longtime Cycle Worlder Matthew Miles and I walked the length of the pit boxes on our way to the Media Center (have your pass ready, right-side up, please). A Moto2 crewman was laboriously scrubbing a bare chassis on one of the wash rigs that travel with the teams. “What you get for your 100,000 euros,” Matt remarked. Racing is like that. If rules prevent you from spending vast treasure on engine development (as they do in spec-engine Moto2), that treasure simply spends itself on some other relevant area—such as a chassis that costs roughly $8,500 a pound! What’s the prize money in Moto2? Never mind—life itself is a game! 
We learn from the schedule that MotoGP World Champion Marc Marquez is scheduled to plant a ceremonial tree in the next few minutes. On our walk, we saw a row of six trees in pots, so we assumed these were prepared by HRC much as they prepare chassis—each one with subtle but crucial differences from the rest—and Marquez will plant the best one after suitable evaluations. Paul Carruthers, new media director for the MotoAmerica racing series whose first practice sessions ran today, revealed that he has 10,000 printed MotoAmerica informational inserts here for distribution. Pallets of them. A fellow journalist who was here yesterday, a Frenchman, reports great paddock excitement over this fresh start for American roadracing. Rain has been predicted, but I’m pleased to report that not a drop fell during our drive to the track. 
THE OPENING PRESS CONFERENCE Two goodies: 1) Yamaha ’s Valentino Rossi saying he is “too old for jet lag”, and 2) Marc Marquez summing up differences between Qatar and COTA by saying that COTA, being more stop-and-go, favors the Hondas, while Qatar, with its more flowing corners, favors the Yamaha with its raditional emphasis on corner speed. Put another way, the dirt-track style of the Honda men works well in lower-speed corners because it centers on using much of each corner for acceleration. But in big, higher-speed corners, the role of acceleration is reduced. Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa is not here at COTA. He had an operation intended to free him from the effects of arm pump. The usual arm-pump operation seeks to prevent a muscle from being starved of oxygen when it swells up during use and is tightly constrained by the fascia, a membrane that encloses it. But Pedrosa has had two previous operations of this kind, which relieve pressure by slitting the fascia. His most recent operation removed the damaged fascia entirely. I wish him the best possible outcome and an early return to MotoGP. 
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