Ben Spies is something of a phenomenon at the moment. Though he's done a bit of racing before, in fact he was AMA Champion, he's rather less well known outside the USA. So when he breezed up on a brand new bike and faced the established greats of the sport - Biaggi, Checa, Neukirchner and, of course, Nori Haga himself, nobody really gave him a second thought. Heck, he hadn't even seen most of the tracks we were going to be racing at before. What sort of threat could he possible prove?

Well at the latter end of the season, with Spies now ahead of Haga in the title hunt and the possibility of having a rookie lift the championship for the first time ever looking ever more likely, I guess that question has been answered. The bigger one is this. How on earth did he do it?

Here, courtesy of Yamaha USA, is the answer. You may get security warnings when you try to view this video - it's hosted on You Tube and was produced and uploaded by Yamaha themselves so it should be pretty safe. I got warnings when I tried to view this as an embedded movie, but I've had no problems so far...