Aussie heros had a quiet weekend on the world motorsport stage without any dramatic highs or lows.

In MotoGP Casey Stoner finished a distant second to first time winner Ben Spies in the Dutch TT at Assen. Tricky conditions with drying track and cold weather made grip hard to find. With a fall in morning warmup championship Stoner seemed in no mood to take unnecessary risks.  A solid podium position resulted in a good points haul and in increased lead in the world championship chase.

The MotoGP drama involved Marco Simoncelli, once again. The Italian Honda rider made a mistake early in the first lap on cold tyres right in front of current World Champion Jorge Lorenzo, causing the Spaniard to fall. Even though Lorenzo managed to pick the Yamaha up and rejoin the race he could only make it back to sixth position.  Crashes in two consecutive races has seen Lorenzo lose the championship lead to Stoner.

In F1 Mark Webber still has not beaten his Red Bull team mate Sebastien Vettel this year. At least Webber managed to finish the race, unlike last year when Webber ran into the back of a slower car and went flying through the air. The other positive for Webber is that he finally made a good start off the line and kept his second place from the starting grid for the early stages of the race.

Webber  finally lost second place to Alonso in a Ferrari during the last round of pit stops. Webber emerged in traffic after his stop  allowing Alosno to to gain time with a clear track. There was more traffic than usual as the whole field finished the race, an unusual occurrence over recent times.

This suggests that that the raft of new teams that came into Formula One last year are starting to come to terms with reliability.  So what is Formula One management going to do – change the engines. Just as the low budget teams have finished spending t large sums of  research money on getting their engines reliable and can turn their attention to making the cars go faster, instead  they will be back to square one.

Marcos Ambrose failed to win a NASCAR Cup race on a road course at the weekend. Despite being one of the pre race favourites his Richard Petty Motorsports Ford did not have the speed to win. A new tyre from Goodyear caught the team out and they could not find the right settings for consistency over a run. Ambrose still managed fifth place but Kurt Busch in the Penske Dodge had the setup right from the drop of the green flag and dominated all day.

There was plenty of drama back in the pack with Tony Stewart causing a big pile up by deliberately ramming another car. Brian Vickers slowed and too avoiding action as the pack bunched up in front of him. The first impression was that Stewart had got caught out by the cars in front of Vickers slowing.  But in a television interview Stewart accused Vickers of blocking and said he deliberately rammed the Red Bull Toyota.  The move pushed Vickers’ Toyota into the pack casing cars to spin with resultant  damage contributing at least one retirement.

At least when Vickers returned the track, many laps down, with a patched up car the payback was clean. Vickers waited for Stewart to lap him and then rammed Stewart’s Chevrolet on top of a tyre barrier.

Close racing and bending panels is part and parcel of exciting racing. Putting large, heavy and powerful cars on tight tracks is a recipe for fender bending. This is part of the attraction of NASCAR racing. What Stewart did was not racing, when Vickers showed respect to fellow drivers and gave them racing room Stewart showed complete disregard for all the other drivers involved with an on track tantrum.