Full Friday free practice times (1) from the Malaysian MotoGP, round 15 of the 2010 world championship.
Jorge Lorenzo will race in the Malaysian Grand Prix on Sunday knowing that as long as he leaves the Sepang circuit with a 75-point advantage he'll have secured, with great panache, his first ever MotoGP World Championship.
Sack me?" Rossi was asked to comment on how much work he thought the Ducati GP10 would need to make it consistently competitive. This spurred Stoner into an equally feisty reply: "I don't care about his opinion, at the moment he's getting his arse kicked by his team-mate." Both characters seem to have forgotten that Rossi was nursing a debilitating, painful shoulder injury, but the harsh words must have fired up Rossi even more.
The grand prix at Motegi was a rollicking race, where we witnessed a fairing-bashing scrap between Rossi and Lorenzo involving plenty of overtaking. It reminded us of what Rossi's injury has robbed us of this season, and he eventually won the battle, finishing third.
Rossi, grinning with his usual infectious enthusiasm, called it proper racing.
Lorenzo didn't. Lorenzo has a point – look at how Formula One team-mates Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel took each other out earlier this season to the detriment of scoring points for their team. Tough, decisive moves by Rossi have provided many of MotoGP's defining images – spitting dirt past Stoner at Laguna Seca in 2008, impossibly sliding under Lorenzo at Catalunya in 2009 – and nobody wants to see them end.
Lin Jarvis, the Yamaha MotoGP boss, has supposedly come out on Lorenzo's side and requested that Rossi calm his tactics if a similar situation arises in the future.