It rained last night, very hard. Whether that is the reason or not, it may simply be the Circuit de Catalunya's notoriously changeable levels of grip, today was a crashfest.

Toni Elias and Randy de Puniet both forgot about the rain and tried to brake on wet curbs in the first ten minutes of the morning session. The result was two seriously bent bikes, especially the Ducati, and two team-managers who cannot have been happy with their riders. In the afternoon, John Hopkins fell coming out of the fast ess bend that makes up the corner at the end of the front straight but was back on track fifteen minutes later. Jorge Lorenzo was not so lucky. He fell going into the first of the two fast righthanders that end the lap and collected a bad enough concussion to get him a 48-hour stay in hospital. Jorge will not be racing on Sunday, so we will not get the hoped- for Lorenzo/Pedrosa show down on Dani's home track.

If anything makes life difficult for the GP this weekend, it will be a planned fuel price protest. Truckers are threatening to blockade the track on race day. Should be fun.

The nice surprise of the day was the pace of the Suzukis, with Loris Capirossi being fast from the off and Chris Vermeulen not far behind. It took a late charge from Dani Pedrosa to depose Capirossi from the top of the timing screens. However, he is still worried about performance on a worn tyre. More on that subject tomorrow.

As the continent is about to be gripped by the 2008 European Football Championship, Valentino Rossi unveiled a new colour scheme based on the Italian football (that's soccer) strip (that's uniform). All the details are there, socks, shorts, shirt with stitched on number and name with the bike in the same blue as the azzurri will wear. Trouble is the bits of flesh that would be visible on a footballer (soccer player), arms, hands, shins, have been coloured in using a vivid pink. It is not Vale's most successful bit of artwork.

If anything makes life difficult for the GP this weekend, it will be a planned fuel price protest. Truckers are threatening to blockade the track on race day. Should be fun.