Victory and vice-championship for Sebastián Porto in Australia.
The Argentinean rider wins with authority in the 250cc; Barros fifth and Hayden sixth in MotoGP. Dani Pedrosa and Valentino Rossi become World Champions at Phillip Island.
Once again, the impressive and fast Australian circuit of Phillip Island has been the venue of epic races in the three classes. The weather respected the world championship show today, allowing to stage an Australian GP under splendid sunshine.
The premier class witnessed an intense duel for the victory and for the world championship title between the only two aspirants Valentino Rossi and Sete Gibernau. The race started with both riders in the lead and Capirossi and Barros following the escaped couple, who had an advantage of one second. Gibernau and Rossi stayed in the lead lap after lap, while Barros, trying to shorten the distance, overtook Capirossi and went after them.
It seemed as if the rider of the Repsol Honda Team would be able to join the fight for the victory but despite closing the gap to less than a second, the Brazilian rider dropped back and was finally caught by Capirossi and the group of his team-mate Nicky Hayden. The North American rider, who had started from the fifteenth place on the grid, recovered several positions until getting the group that was fighting for the fifth place, with Biaggi, Tamada, Bayliss and Edwards as travel mates.
The Repsol Honda Team rider, swapped positions within the group throughout the race until managing to take the chequered flag in sixth place, a few tenths of a second behind his team-mate Alex Barros, who finished fifth after being overtaken in the last lap by Edwards while trying to overtake Capirossi to get on the podium.
The third Repsol rider Rubén Xaus, who started from the fourth row of the starting grid with the twelfth fastest time, finished eleventh behind Carlos Checa with whom he had been lapping throughout the race. Valentino Rossi won the race and became World Champion.
In the 250cc race, Sebastián Porto made his own race and quickly opened a gap to the rest of the pack. There was an intense fight for the leading spot between Pedrosa, Porto and De Angelis during the first two laps, but the Argentinean Repsol rider quickly took the lead of the race and escaped from the rest of the participants until crossing the finish line. De Angelis finished second after a solitary race and Poggiali was third after overtaking Pedrosa, who finished fourth and became World Champion. Fonsi Nieto was not able to finish the race after suffering a crash on the first lap together with Alex Debón, fortunately with no physical consequences for the riders.
Different luck in the minor class for the Repsol riders in the penultimate GP of the season. They both started from the fourth row of the grid – Pablo Nieto thirteenth and Sergio Gadea fourteenth – and Gadea managed to improve during the race, as opposed to his team-mate Pablo Nieto. They both made a bad start, with Nieto nineteenth and Gadea twenty-third after the first lap. From that moment on, Gadea began to remount until the eighth place. Meanwhile, Pablo Nieto fell back, and only his will to overcome the technical problems of his Aprilia allowed him to fight for a better position. Finally Gadea crossed the finish line in tenth place and Pablo Nieto in fifteenth. The race was won by the recently crowned world champion Andrea Dovizioso.
