Dani day in Deutschland

This week the giant bubble of hilarity that is the Moto GP paddock decamped to Sachsenring in Germany. Now this season has been missing something but finally on Sunday it happened. Dani Pedrosa won. It was marvellous. He had a brilliant battle with Stinky until about twelve laps to go when he overtook him with a lovely smooth maneouvre. The BBC for some reason seemed to think Casey 'had let him past' on purpose which is frankly ludicrous and anyway Dani's laptimes were faster the whole time he was stuck behind Casey and he clearly had no trouble keeping ahead of him once he did pass him. But there was more to come. Firstly we had the brilliant battles further down the field. Lovely Dovi and his teammate Cal Crutchlow were once again throwing everything they had at each other for fourth place, which eventually meant that Cal pushed a bit too hard and ran off track ending up in eighth. Valentino Rossi had a stellar battle all race with Nicky Hayden and Hector Barbera with all of them trading positions several times which was made all the better by Alvaro Bautista's stunning run from right at the back of the grid right through to seventh position.  The highlight of Alvaro's spectacular (and mad) race was his hilarious kamikaze move towards the end of the last lap where he seemingly said to himself "screw it. I'm going. Aaaaaaaaaah!!" and just lunged desperatley past three people and right to the edge of the track. I don't know how he stayed on but he did so kudos to Alvaro on that one. On top of all that excitement Vale managed to finish in sixth and home town hero Stefan Bradl finished in fifth which was really fantastic to see both for him and all the lovely people at team LCR, not least the delectable Lucio Cecchinello himself. But that wasn't the most dramatic moment of the day. This came on the second last corner of the last lap with Dani pushing hard and Casey pushing even harder to try and overtake him. Then the end of Casey's bike folded and slid out from underneath him. At HQ we couldn't believe our eyes, we'd been jokingly pointing at him all race (actually all season) in the style of the evil monkey from family guy and the bbc man had been predicting that he would retake the lead when suddenly down he goes. Actually though you could see it coming, he seemed to be pushing way harder than Dani and right on to his limits and a few times in the last few laps his bike had been squirming and sliding all over the track. So Dani wrapped up his first victory of the season and his hattrick of victorys at Sachsenring. His beaming little face on the podium was just wonderful and watching him jump up and down with excitement was adorable. And we even got a Pedrossi moment when they shook hands as they rode around post-race. Brilliant