Three-time World Superbike champ Troy Bayliss (Photo: Ducati Corse) » More Photos

Bayliss won races in 2000, the year Colin Edwards took his first title for Honda. Then in 2001 Bayliss took the title. He lost it back to Edwards (Honda) in 2002 in a thrilling two-man battle that went to the final round, but by then Bayliss had already been picked to develop and race the Desmosedici 990 along with Loris Capirossi in MotoGP.

Although Capirossi got better results, both riders were competitive on the V4 in 2003, but in 2004 Ducati got it all wrong. The bike was such a handful that the first podium of the year went to Ruben Xaus riding a 2003 version of the Desmosedici at Losail, Qatar.

At the end of that season Bayliss was fired by Ducati team director Livio Suppo, a move that angered even Ducati CEO Federico Minoli, and one that saw Ducati's most popular rider move to the Honda Pons team.

It was a hard and ragged year for Bayliss. His Pons crew chief said of Bayliss, “He treated the throttle like a light switch -- all on or all off -- and he seemed to fight with the bike.”

Bayliss admits that the change was a hard one and that he had difficulty adjusting to the rigid and unforgiving RC211V, but he feels that if he had not broken his wrist and forearm during the 2005 summer break (riding a motocross bike in Australia) he would have finished that season with better results.

By the time of his crash, which kept him out for the remainder of the year, he was already talking to Ducati Corse about coming back to ride the 999 Superbike along with Lorenzo Lanzi.

And, we know the rest: World Champion in 2006 and now again in 2008. Perhaps the most memorable of the 51 wins that Bayliss has scored so far at the world championship level was not one of the 50 that he has racked up to date in World Superbike, but that amazing MotoGP win at Valencia in 2006 when, after having won the SBK title, he replaced the injured Sete Gibernau and won the Grand Prix of the Community of Valencia on the day that Rossi crashed and Nicky Hayden took third (back of Bayliss and Capirossi on the red Desmosedici V4s) to secure the world title.

Very, very reliable witnesses swore on a stack of bibles that they distinctly heard Troy say something very rude to Livio Suppo, the same man who fired him at the end of 2004, when he parked the Ducati in front of the podium. Bayliss denies this and a horde of red-clad Ducati media personal descended in the Valencia media center that evening hunting down journalists and trying to dissuade us from writing anything about that incident. Such fierce denials are always suspicious.

Whether he did or didn’t speak his mind to Livio, everyone who knows Troy Bayliss understands just how galling it was to be fired by Ducati in 2004 after a hard year on a blotched bike. That win at Valencia made the Superbike paddock proud and left MotoGP elitists looking for a way to dismiss the win as a fluke (Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, usually at the podium when titles are decided, chose to hang out in Rossi's garage rather than congratulate an interloper from World Superbike who beat the MotoGP field).