How wrong could I have been in my last post? Here I was predicting that Haydon wouldn’t be on the Ducati next year and then he goes and puts in the most spectacular qualifying performance and probably would have translated that into a race result had he not been knocked off the bike. Ben Spies in the meantime has signed for Yamaha so he won’t be going to the Ducati Moto GP team.

The wording of the press release from Yamaha regarding the future of Ben Spies was as vague as it possibly could be. They “foresee” Spies remaining in Superbike for 2010, which translated means “We’ll wait and see what happens with Edwards and Toseland before making a decision”.

And then, what about the news that Haga might retire at the end of the year? I was very sceptical about this one considering that he hasn’t done what he set out to do – win a world championship. He is not too old and he’s still on the pace so why retire? The only thing I can think of is that all of the injuries he has sustained over the years are starting to hurt. But then, he hasn’t denied the rumours so perhaps he’s waiting to see if he wins the championship before deciding.

Should Haga retire, who would take his place at Ducati to ride along side the fiery Roman? With the Sterilgada teams future in doubt, there is an outside chance that it could be Shakey Burne.

Ducati are adamant that Stoner will be back on his Moto GP bike before the end of the year so we’ll have to take their word for it. That means that the top two Moto GP teams have finalised their rider line-up for next year. In fact, outside of the Tech 3 Yamaha team, it seems that most of the teams have rider contracts in place.

The World Superbike line-up on the other hand is still very much undecided and several of the riders I criticised for non-performance have come good. Fabrizio on the other hand who I believed was going to challenge for the championship has gone slightly off the boil and had a particularly bad day in Germany.

Corsa seems to have got the measure of the BMW and appears to be enjoying himself so I’ll withdraw my prediction that he’ll retire at the end of the year. Carlos Checa has at best been inconsistent this year but then he managed to ride out of his leathers at the Nurburgring. Ten Kate Honda would be silly to loose Johnny Rea but I’m still not certain that Checa will be staying.

With all of my predictions seeming to be wrong, perhaps I’ll wait until further into the silly season before making any more.

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