What do you do when qualifying has been red-flagged with only 2 minutes left and you still need to set a time? If you're Mick Doohan, you go for it, of course.
The Day Doohan Left It All Out On The track
It happens quite often in racing; an incident interrupts proceedings and everyone haas to make their way back to the pits while it is sorted out.
It doesn’t often happen in a race but in qualifying, that’s a different matter. What can make it worse is if there are only a few minutes left of the qualifying session, making it a do-or-die situation for those still to set a competitive time and get them selves as far up the grid as possible.
1998; Mick Doohan's Last Title Year
In 1998, Mick Doohan was cruising to the fifth and last of his 500cc World Championship titles, but that didn’t mean that he was taking it easy. Oh, no! He was still pushing just as hard as he always had.
When, during the dying moments of qualifying for the Dutch TT at Assen, Ralf Waldmann crashed and the session was red-flagged with only 2 minutes and 12 seconds of the qualifying period left to run. Remember that this was the old Assen circuit, with the long square loop after the start-finish straight. Lap times were just over two minutes which meant that all the riders trying to qualify would have to produce an out-lap from pit lane very close to race pace in order to cross the start-finish line in time to be able to run a fast qualifying lap.
You've Got Two Minutes; Make it Count
14 bikes left pit lane in a gaggle, while provisional pole man, Simon Crafar - he who is the current pit lane reporter for MotoGP - chose to sit it out in his pit. Would his lap time of 2:02.491 be enough? Everyone thought it would, given the circumstances.
But they had all reckoned without Mick Doohan. He treated the out lap like a race, passing everyone else to make sure he was first across the line, which he crossed with bare seconds to spare. He then proceeded to ride one of the greatest laps of his life.
Assen - then and even now, in truncated form - is a very fast circuit and the Grand Prix bikes of the time were furiously fast and wild 500cc two-strokes; no electronics reining in the power, it was down to rider skill. Doohan rode like a man possessed, faster than he had ever lapped the circuit, while the camera played on Crafar’s nervous smile.
The Greatest Lap Ever?
Bit by bit, Doohan chipped away at Crafar’s time - a hundredth here, a hundredth there. He was mesmerising to watch - man and machine at the peak of their talents. Crossing the line, he was just shy of four tenths of a second underneath Crafar’s time; he had taken pole position and set a new lap record in the process.
It was, possibly, the greatest single lap in the history of Grand Prix racing.
