I was rather surprised by Miguel DuHamel's opinion that it was likely a catastrophic engine failure that caused him to crash out the Sunday Superbike race at Mid-O:

"I think the (engine) seized on the crank," said DuHamel at the Honda truck after the race. "That's about as rare as seeing a comet no one else has ever seen before and calling up NASA. It's really unlucky."

I'll say. If so, this is a significant event for American Honda. I'm talking serious bad news here. In case you were wondering, modern 4-cylinder Japanese engines simply don't blow up -- at least not in the way DuHamel explained it. To completely lock one of these motors at the crank, something has to've gone terribly wrong internally. And we're probably not talking about a bent valve or broken cam chain, either. One has to wonder if we might be talking "gee, maybe we shouldn't haved shaved down the internal parts so much in a n effort to save weight" problems.

Let's hope for Honda's sake (and for the sake of modern motorcycle engineering as a whole) that such a failure is not what happened.