This years Moto GP was April 11th, 12th, & 13th.

I WONT BE OFFENDED IF YOU SKIP ALL THIS RAMBLING AND SCROLL DOWN TO THE PHOTOS

THE RACING

I went all 3 days and had a great time.
The wind was really strong with gusts up to 20mph on Friday and Saturday, but only partly cloudy skies. Sunday, the day of the actual races, the wind had dropped to around 10mph but the sky's clouded up and there was a threat of rain all day.
Like F1, and unlike Nascar, what rains means to MotoGP is they have to know which tires to run. They go rain or shine. I think lightning, super high winds, and hail, are the only things that halts a race. They did postpone the Moto2 race for about 10 minutes because it started to sprinkle, but that was only to determine if it was a dry race or a wet race. Ultimately it was a dry race.
There are 3 classes of races. Moto3 is 250CC single cylinder bikes. This is possibly the most fun race to watch. They don't go all that fast, but it's anyone's race. I've seen a guy in 11th place for the first 10 laps of an 18 lap race end up taking first place. The riders in this class can be as young as 16. Currently there is only one female racing, and she's in Moto3.
The next class is Moto2. These bikes all have the same engine, currently a Honda engine. There are specification ranges on other parts of the bike, but they are all pretty much custom builds other than the engine. The riders tend to be 18 and older
Then there are the big boys, MotoGP are 800 to 1000CC bikes built to meet certain specifications and criteria. The factory teams are all given the same computer control unit, but can customize the software in it. The open class bikes all have to run with the spec software.

THE PHOTOGRAPHY

Unfortunately I was unaware of a setting that had been changed in my camera and most of the photos from Friday were very under exposed. Saturday was just about perfect for photos. Low temp, cloudy the clearing up. The morning wind was the only difficulty. Most of the photos I've chosen are from Saturday.
Other than a few super wide angle shots taken up in the tower, I shot everything with my Tamron SP 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di VC USD lens or my Nikkor 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR. The Tamron is a great lens for the price, and is excellent with one exception. It doesn't do well for me at full zoom and near infinity focus. In fact photo 58 is actually a super small crop of photo 57, which is also slightly cropped, and was taken with the Nikon.
All the photos were taken with my new Nikon D5300 body. I'm loving this camera.

I pretty much kept the camera in burst mode all weekend. I took 5 or 6 shots every time I pressed the shutter button. I use Sandisk Extreme Pro SD cards that can actually write at 90mb/s so am able to take full advantage of the relatively high speed bursts my camera can shoot. (8.5 frames a second I think) Of course this new camera is also 24mp so I ended up filling 2.5 SD cards on Saturday.

I tried to use slower shutter speeds and deeper F stops this year to get more background blur. Man, I'll tell ya, doing that on small bikes is a LOT harder than doing it on big race cars. But over all I'm pleased. I also tried to capture more groups of bikes this year instead of just close ups of single bikes. Of course I can't help but try and capture some super zooms as they blast by. It's the challenge of it that I enjoy. My "lessons learned" this year was that the slow shutter speeds are best use when you are shooting at or near perpendicular to the bike. If the angle is such that he's more approaching you than going by you, the slow speeds just don't work.