So, team orders are back in the news. And with the FIA World Motor Sport Council due to look at Ferrari’s actions at the German Grand Prix, they’re set to stay in the news. Oh joy.

How does Formula 1 keep getting into this mess? The standard argument is that it’s a team sport, so team orders are unavoidable. I agree. The problem comes, I believe, when team orders are issued in the heat of competition.

Felipe Massa being told, while leading the race, that he had to give the place to Fernando Alonso, was never going to go down well. Had Massa known, before the race, that he’d never be allowed to lead his team mate – assuming he didn’t, of course – then perhaps the place could have been swapped a little more seamlessly.

But that would have meant telling Massa, in only the middle of the season, that his role is now to support Alonso, not go for the championship himself. Which is a tough conversation to justify. It’s easier to get Massa’s engineer to tell him to move over in the middle of a race, as and when required. Quite cowardly on the part of Ferrari management though, isn’t it?

Take MotoGP: with no radio communications during the race, any team move has to be orchestrated between the riders alone, knowing what the team expects of them, and they can generally do it in a more acceptable manner. And only later in the season, when that conversation is more justifiable. Unless it’s Yamaha, who wouldn’t even try to have that conversation with Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo.

It’s a similar story in the World Rally Championship: there was uproar when Sebastien Ogier was used in the heat of the moment to benefit Sebastien Loeb at Rally Jordan. But Ford and Citroen both have established number two drivers, and that’s not really a problem.

The rule of thumb should be: if you can’t rationally discuss team orders in advance, and come to an agreement with all concerned, then they’re probably not justifiable. If you go ahead anyway, half-arsed in the heat of the moment, then you’re going to piss off the fans.

Not sure exactly how the FIA can phrase that in the rule book, though.

Valentino Rossi missed races after his crash, and he’s not back up to full fitness. But after finishing 4th last week in Germany, it’s tempting to think that maybe, just maybe, he could still have a go at the MotoGP title.

We’re eight races down, with ten to go. Jorge Lorenzo has 185 points and a very nice championship lead; Rossi is 6th with 74 points. That’s a 111 point deficit, so if Rossi can score 12 points per race more than Lorenzo, then that would do the job.

It’s an average, and if Lorenzo has a couple of non-finishes, then obviously it would be a very different picture. And there are other riders in with a chance. But 12 points per race is illustrative of the magnitude of the task. So what does that look like? This:

With Rossi winning, Lorenzo couldn’t finish better than 4th. And 4th is the worst position Rossi could finish, with Lorenzo 15th or lower. In short: 12 points per race is an awful lot.

You might remember the start of the MotoGP season in Qatar, and fact that qualifying and the support races weren’t available on Freeview. Masters Golf took priority, even though it was on BBC Two at the same time. Certainly I remember. I even got a response on the matter from the BBC.

But this weekend, with the German Grand Prix from Sachsenring, the BBC might have learned its lesson. MotoGP is up against Open Golf, in competition for that precious single Freeview BBC Red Button stream. And MotoGP wins! Mainly.

Admittedly, it might be because the golf is on virtually uninterrupted all day Saturday and Sunday, between BBC One and Two.

Nevertheless, the good news is that the words “Not available on Freeview” on the Red Button schedule don’t appear alongside MotoGP – apart from Sunday’s post-race extra half hour. But that’s okay: we can live without that, can’t we?

The important thing is that Freeview gets qualifying on Saturday 1150-1505, and the 125cc and Moto2 races on Sunday 0950-1205, all on the Red Button. And of course the main coverage on BBC Two 1245-1400. That’s more like it!

There’s been so much talk, and with so much certainty, about riders moving teams in MotoGP – specifically Stoner to Honda, and Rossi to Ducati – that you can’t really call them rumours. And they’re starting to come true.

The stage was set this morning with the confirmation that Casey Stoner will be leaving Ducati at the end of the season.

Lo and behold, minutes later, Honda announced the signing of Stoner, to what’s hoped to be a three-rider factory team.

There may have only been minutes in it, but it’s nice to see the announcements being orchestrated such that one relationship was ended before another was announced. It’s only right and proper.

The words from Ducati and Stoner could be superficial, but they sound genuine to me, and I hope they are. Ducati’s Filippo Preziosi:

“In Casey we not only found an incredibly talented rider, but also an honest and loyal guy and that’s why there will always be a strong and sincere bond between us, even as a competitor.”

And Stoner:

“I must thank Ducati for giving me such a great opportunity to race and win with them over these past four years. They took a gamble when they signed me at the end of 2006 as I was unknown, but as we worked together we were able to win a Championship, many races and challenge for the Championship in the last two seasons.”

To be fair to Ducati, Stoner wasn’t quite unknown at the end of 2006, but he was mainly known for binning it rather too often.

How long, then, until Ducati confirm Valentino Rossi?

The concept of the ‘aliens’ is well established in the MotoGP class – the riders the rest of the pack simply can’t match. It was Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa last season. You might include Andrea Dovizioso now too.

Moto2 is far too even to see anything similar, but it looks like aliens might have started to land in 125cc. It wasn’t perhaps so clear over the first three races of the year, when Efren Vazquez and Esteve Rabat were muddying the waters by picking up the odd podium, but the last four races have clarified matters.

The alien leader is undoubtedly Marc Marquez, who has won all four of those races. The lesser aliens, who have been fighting over the three places behind him at each of those races, are Pol Espargaro, Nicolas Terol and the only non-Spaniard, Britain’s very own Bradley Smith.

At the fourth race of the season, in Italy, just 0.161 seconds covered the four of them, with 10 seconds back to 5th place. It wasn’t quite as close at Silverstone, with 17 seconds covering the top four, but 5th place 36 seconds down on the winner. It was 10 seconds back to 4th in Assen, and 37 seconds to 5th. Terol messed it up a bit in Catalunya yesterday by crashing out, but there were only 5 seconds covering the remaining potential aliens, with 4th place 40 seconds down the road.

The rest of the season will tell whether they are truly aliens, but you wouldn’t bet against one of them winning the championship, as it stands. And Smith is probably an outside chance, after his troubled start to the season. In fact, given his current form, it would be brave to back anyone but Marquez.

The MotoGP grid in Catalunya looked bleak as the race got under way, as it’s tended to recently. For the first part of the race, it didn’t matter. But then the mistakes mounted up.

It started with Dani Pedrosa who, weighing about the same as a sparrow, was first into the first corner, and then promptly went very wide and off the track. That was him out of contention for the win.

That left Andrea Dovizioso to challenge Jorge Lorenzo, the two excitedly swapping places, with Casey Stoner close behind in third. Then it was Stoner’s turn to run well wide, and drop back from the leaders. Finally Dovizioso decided to bin it entirely, leaving Lorenzo to have it all to himself.

What’s frustrating is that there was the start of a really good race, right up to the point that Lorenzo was abandoned completely at the front. Is the problem the breadth, or the depth of the grid?

If you look at the results, there are riders who you’d think should have been waiting to take advantage of the misfortune of others. But no, Lorenzo was joined on the podium by Pedrosa and Stoner, despite their mistakes.

Where was Stoner’s team mate and former world champion, Nicky Hayden, who has by and large had a better season than Stoner so far? Down in 8th, nearly 30 seconds behind the winner, and fractions of a second ahead of Marco Melandri, who was riding with a broken sternum. Not good enough!

The best of the customer teams, Randy de Puniet on the LCR Honda, was 4th, but 18 seconds off the winner, and 13 seconds off the podium places. Ben Spies was the best Tech 3 Yamaha, in 6th, 22 seconds behind Lorenzo’s factory bike. Colin Edwards was an alarming 11th.

The customer bikes are supposed to be pretty close to the factory equivalents. So is the problem the riders or the equipment? Who knows, but it’s a sorry state of affair that they can’t compete at all with the ‘aliens’, even when they make a bit of a mess of it.

In better news, Suzuki got their best result for ages, Alvaro Bautista 5th and Loris Capirossi 7th. It was nice to see their bikes, with that rather smashing shade of blue, getting some TV time.

And in even better news, we might have Valentino Rossi back for the next race, if rumours are to be believed. Even if he’s still very much recovering, the MotoGP grid will be a less bleak place with Rossi on it.

It must be pretty comfortable to be a Spanish MotoGP fan. There are a remarkable four races in the country this year: we’ve been to Jerez, it’s Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya this weekend, and Aragon and Valencia are still to come.

Even more remarkable is that those four races aren’t actually very well distributed around the country. But that should be of little concern to the Spanish, who have got a lot to cheer about.

As previously established, Spain has given us more riders on the grid for the three classes than any other country, and by a fair margin. Not only that, but they’re winning everything.

The 125cc class is the most extreme. So far this season, every race has been won by one of three Spaniards – Nicolas Terol, Pol Espargaro and Marc Marquez. It’s close between the three of them at the top of the championship, and they’ve opened up a bit of a gap over the man in 4th.

That man is Britain’s Bradley Smith, the only non-Spaniard in the top six. Indeed, he is the only rider from outside Spain to have stepped on the 125cc podium this year. It’s been close to a complete whitewash by the Spanish. Or would that be yellow-and-red-wash? No, it would not.

Things are going Spain’s way least in Moto2. It’s still a Spaniard leading the championship though, in the form of Toni Elias. But race wins have also gone to Japan, Italy and France, and there’s a Swiss rider standing 3rd in the championship.

In MotoGP itself, Spain has been a bit lucky. Valentino Rossi’s crash at Mugello put him out of action for the foreseeable future, leaving room for two Spaniards in the top two championship positions – Jorge Lorenzo having a hefty lead over Dani Pedrosa. Between them they’ve won all but one of the six races up to now – the other one, naturally, went to Rossi.

So, lots for the crowd in Barcelona this weekend to cheer about: it would be surprising if there wasn’t a home win in 125cc; anything could happen in Moto2, but Elias is as good a bet as anyone; and it’s going to take sudden inspiration from someone to stop Pedrosa or Lorenzo winning in MotoGP.

Italy – MotoGP’s other great nation – is not one to be left out though: there could be a lot to cheer about there this weekend if the rumours are true that Ducati are going to reveal that they’ve signed Valentino Rossi. Italy’s very own GOAT, riding Italy’s very own Desmosedici? The country would practically explode.

Maybe it’s the warm weather of summer making people restless and irritable, but there seem to be a lot of feisty words being bandied about.

Thankfully, Ferrari have finally gone quiet about the unfortunate (for them) safety car events in Valencia. But it could flare up again, as Lewis Hamilton agreed with a journalist’s question that it was sour grapes on the part of Fernando Alonso. It’s not like Alonso needs any provoking.

Another man who needs no encouragement is Juan Pablo Montoya. His words about Jeff Gordon, following Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race, were pretty special though:

“He has it coming one day.”

Blimey, threatening at all?

But for me, the best quotes of all come from Casey Stoner. I’m not sure who exactly has been talking to him, and whether they were prodding him with a pointy stick at the same time, but he called Yamaha’s decision to put Wataru Yoshikawa on Valentino Rossi’s bike “atrocious”, and had plenty to say about the number of bikes on the grid:

“They’re talking about a maximum of 22, and that being a big grid – it’s pathetic, it’s a joke.”

His solution? A couple more Suzuki machines, and year-old bikes for new small teams. Presumably he’d be sponsoring all the new entries personally.

Sources linked to above: Ferrari, Sporting Life, autosport.com

The 125cc race at Assen today wasn’t great. It was shaping up reasonably though: Nico Terol was following Marc Marquez closely at the front, keeping alive the prospect of a dramatic finish.

That drama went out of the window when Dutch wildcard rider Jerry van de Bunt decided to not really get out of the way of the leaders at all. It ended badly for him when Terol punted him off, but the interference was enough to give Marquez a comfortable lead over Terol. Inevitably, that’s how the race ended.

Pol Espargaro was some distance back in 3rd, and Bradley Smith another decent gap back from him. The only close battle towards the end of the race was between Danny Webb and Randy Krummenacher for 6th, which Webb eventually lost.

It brings to mind the game show Chain Letters, hosted by the likes of Jeremy Beadle and Dave Spikey. As the theme tune explained: “Take a word / Change a letter / Do it again / And you’ve got a chain.”

So, Jerry van de Bunt, thanks for killing the race. I’d like to change the ‘B’ to a ‘C’.

You’ll remember that, last year, Felipe Massa missed the end of the Formula 1 season after a very nasty accident. Ferrari initially replaced him with their long-term test driver Luca Badoer, who hadn’t raced in many years. It didn’t go well.

Ferrari’s parent company is Fiat, sponsor of the MotoGP factory Yamaha team. That’s mainly because Ferrari love Valentino Rossi, who is out injured, and for whom Yamaha need a replacement. You’d think that Fiat might offer some advice in the circumstances.

It would seem not. Because Yamaha have announced that Rossi’s replacement is their long-term test rider Wataru Yoshikawa, who hasn’t raced in many years.

Yamaha are doing exactly what Ferrari did last year, with so little success. Astonishing. Admittedly, when Ferrari later put Giancarlo Fisichella in the car, it didn’t get any better. But that’s not the point.

There are even more similarities. Ferrari’s first choice of replacement was Michael Schumacher, but that didn’t work out. Yamaha had apparently looked to move Colin Edwards up to the factory team, and fill his Tech 3 Yamaha seat with Yamaha World Superbike rider Cal Crutchlow. But that couldn’t be made to work, schedule-wise. And Tech 3 Yamaha rider Ben Spies is technically a rookie, so strictly speaking couldn’t ride for the factory team.

There must have been other options though, surely.

James Toseland – probably the most logical man to step back up to MotoGP, given that he rode for Tech 3 Yamaha last season, and is with Yamaha in World Superbikes this year – wasn’t asked.

What about someone like Moto2 rider Toni Elias? I’m sure he’s concentrating on winning that championship for Gresini, but couldn’t some agreement have been reached for him to show what he can do back up in the premier class?

But no, we have Yoshikawa. A prospect that’s not going to get anyone excited. Ho hum.