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Late last Saturday night, in the front row press conference at the Losail Circuit in Qatar, pole setter Jorge Lorenzo was struggling to find the right words to describe the emerging threat of the man sat immediately to his left.

"This year Cal is more... 'mantequilla'" he finally says, reverting to his native language.

Mantequilla, Spanish for butter, is the word Lorenzo uses to describe his own smooth approach to finding the fastest way around a circuit; a trait he believes he inherited from his mother because of the dextrous way she would flick her knife across his morning toast, using the perfect angle of lean to cover every corner with minimum effort.

The other half of Lorenzo's racing DNA is made up of 'el martillo' (the hammer), the relentless and consistently accurate way he is able to string together lap after lap with metronomic timing.

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