By Dan Moakes
January 11 2006

Happy New Year readers, and welcome to the latest Motorcycle Racing Online e-Newsletter.

The off-season makes for somewhat of a slowdown in site activity, so I’d like to thank you all for your continued patience - assuming you haven’t given up and gone elsewhere already! Winter is the ideal time to reflect back on the previous season, and put all the action into context. Hopefully you will have read and enjoyed our review articles for the 2005 Superbike series - both on the World stage and in the ever-dramatic British championship. I hope you weren’t afraid to vote for these when they were fresh, and thereby enter them in the SportNetwork ‘story of the month’ stakes. And don’t forget to take our findings to task on the MRO message board, if you didn’t happen to agree with them. Otherwise, we’ll assume you did! Perhaps you have your own personal top ten riders from 2005?

Rest assured, our in-depth review of the 2005 MotoGP World Championship season is creeping ever nearer to completion. If only there were more hours in the day, and your author wasn’t such a perfectionist. These comments surely also apply to the ongoing task of bringing you our comprehensive rider profile articles. The off-season also fits the bill as a time to work on these, and recent additions have been Gregorio Lavilla, Chris Vermeulen and Shin’ya Nakano. The profiles of Valentino Rossi, Troy Corser and Noriyuki Haga have been brought up to date lately, and there will hopefully be similar work on the top GP and SBK riders. On the ‘to do’ list are Nicky Hayden, Makoto Tamada, Yukio Kagayama, Lorenzo Lanzi and Chris Walker...

In the meantime, keep sharing your news and views on the message board. What were your best moments of 2005? Who will surprise in 2006, and who will disappoint? Is there anything left for Valentino Rossi to achieve, and is the WSBK series wide open - perhaps in contrast to MGP? Maybe you just want to share your earliest memories of the sport, your first heroes, or what got you hooked to start with? There’s plenty of scope, so don’t wait for me to start you off. Or perhaps you have ideas about features that are missing from the site, or ways of getting more people onto the forum. Knock yourself out, as they say.

‘subh’