Clearly the 2005 off-season has been a criminally ironic period in racing, with most of the incidents not even needing comment or reporting for enthusiasts to recognize them. To wit:

Kenny Roberts' GP team signs deal with Honda. For thirty years, Kenny Roberts has been a the anti-Honda, as a rider and a GP team owner. He alone battled Spencer and HRC for the title in '83, he and Rainey beat Honda and Doohan for the world championships in the early 1990s, his independent GP team was designed to break the back of GP teams like HRC by building smaller/lighter/faster GP bikes for less money than a one-season HRC lease deal.

Assuredly a two-year contract with HRC isn't a lifetime agreement—and does keep the dream alive— but it is going to be difficult for some fans to see a Roberts bike with a Honda engine in it.

Ducati—tired of American riders and their day-to-day, ah, "fluctuating" riding performance— swore off American riders for their '06 US team. Then they hired perhaps the most American rider currently racing—Ben Bostrom.

Yamaha tantalizes us all by building a beautiful R1LE motorcycle with all the bits to make it uber-competitve in Superbike but then decides to race it—only—in Superstock in '06.

And possibly the most cruel twist of the off-season? The Italian circuit Monza—one of the greatest race tracks the world will ever know—is now under threat from local townspeople because the racing is deemed too loud. Racing too loud for Italians; welcome to hell everybody.

A local judge has banned motorsports activities at Monza "unless the vehicles involved are fitted with a silencing system to reduce noise levels".

While these noise complaints currently center on the F1 event at Monza, assuredly it won't be long before the World Superbike machines are petitioned against.

According to a news report, the well-accepted adage that every Italian is a motorsports fan is dead. The Italian judge in charge of this case termed racing a "superfluous, dangerous and socially useless activity that (has) a major impact on the environment".

Monza, (or Parco de Monza as the sign outside the facility reads) is a race track inside the Italian city of Monza.