Valentino Rossi's confidence was obvious from the first laps of the first free practice session. He was relaxed, chatty and confident. His crew have taken just four races to, in the words of Jerry Burgess, turn his M1 from a Yamaha bike into a Bridgestone bike.

Shanghai is full of contradictions, a city devoted to commerce and profit in the one remaining Communist superpower. Take one of the many shops in the sparkling new Terminal Two at Pudong airport, not a top-drawer designer franchise but the slightly tackier souvenir outlet: there you can still find, if you look hard enough, a poster showing the images of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Mao captioned 'Long Live Marxist-Leninist Thought of Mao Tse-Tung' Next to it and obviously from the same range is a fist, thumb and pinkie extended, with the legend 'Hang Loose!' emblazoned thereon. Confusing, no? Much like the Chinese GP.

This was probably the last Chinese race for the foreseeable future and quite a few people have, to their surprise, found that they might miss the place. The city of Shanghai is a truly fascinating place and the circuit has produced surprisingly good racing despite being designed for Formula 1. However, the lack of local interest is emphasized by the Brobdingnagian scale of the pit buildings and grandstands and it's difficult to get really enthusiastic about any event, even one as interesting as Sunday's, when it takes place in a vacuum.

However, what happened brought the season so far into focus. Valentino Rossi's confidence was obvious from the first laps of the first free practice session. He was relaxed, chatty and confident. His crew have taken just four races to, in the words of Jerry Burgess, turn his M1 from a Yamaha bike into a Bridgestone bike. The race saw Rossi at his best on a bike that looked like it was on rails no matter what the pace: he refused to panic when Pedrosa showed signs of breaking away in the opening laps, got to the front on lap five and was never headed. He was, however, harried for the entire race by Dani Pedrosa. The pair swapped fastest laps eight times in the next thirteen laps as Rossi progressively upped the pace but couldn't shake off the Honda. He thought 1.59.6 would be enough but Pedrosa forced him into a new lap record at 1.59.2 at which point the Spaniard cried enough. It was noticeable that he never took Rossi's slipstream down the 1.2km main straight because, it transpired, the headwind of practice and qualifying had swung round to become a very strong tailwind and the Honda was over-revving. Dani also reported he felt the gearshift tightening up and decided to play safe - after all, his twenty points took him to the top of the table. His Honda also sounded flat in those closing laps and a couple of the other Hondas also slowed dramatically leading to speculation that the V4s, still without pneumatic valves, were running into fuel consumption worries.

Casey Stoner was a lonely third, still puzzled as to why he can't better last year's times, but Ducati were cheered no end by the return to form of Marco Melandri, who was part of a spectacular group dice for the lower leaderboard placings.

To complete Yamaha's joy, Jorge Lorenzo rode a hero's race with damage to both feet and ankles. Under the circumstances, fourth place was exceptional. What would have happened if he had been fully fit?