As a hard core Rossi fan, today’s Austrian race was tough to take. Seeing him rise as high as fourth, only to fall back to a lonely seventh and not be able to make up any ground on current bikes and even last years Yamaha bike. So I loaded up a few riders lap times into my graphing app, excluded the first lap since it skews the times, and here’s the results:

For this analysis, I chose Rossi for obvious reasons, Dovi with him being the race winner, and Pedrosa as as was a podium finisher and didn’t really have too many battles in the race. While Dovi and Marquez were fast, they also fought for the win and their lap times suffered some because of that.

You can see that Rossi was competitive in the beginning of the race but then his times suffered and never recovered. While there was a jump up in times between laps 12 and 15, his lap times from 16 to the end of the race got progressively worse. I’m sure you could say that the last 5 laps, his motivation fell and his lap times showed that. But from the mid-race on, he was not able to keep the same pace as the riders ahead of him.

I’m fairly new at making these graphs or providing analysis of the times, so if there are any changes you’d like to see, feel free to let me know. Thanks for checking it out!