((thanks to topsportracing for this photo)
A year ago, Valentino Rossi debuted for Ducati MotoGp at Losail after the most hyped-up pre-season testing session on record. The Doctor’s defection to the Italian marque to replace the disenchanted Casey Stoner seemed like the creation of the ultimate dream team. The Italian media were hyperventilating at the prospect of the best rider on the best bike (their emphasis) and the ultimate goal of an Italian rider winning the world championship on an Italian bike.
Perhaps they should have consulted their history books. Italian champions on Italian machines are rare, at least in the modern era. You have to go back to the days of Giacomo Agostini to see it happen in the premier class on a regular basis and you can count on the fingers of one hand how many Italian drivers have won GP’s in a Ferrari in the modern era as well.
Rossi qualified well off the pace at Losail in 2011 and finished a disappointing 6th, 11 seconds off the race winner, Casey Stoner’s, race time.
What followed was the worst of Italian operatic farce, played out in public, on the world’s biggest stage, in front of GP racing’s harshest critics, the notorious Italian Press. Disaster after disaster greeted every successive race. Mumblings of discontent from the Italian Press and Rossi’s legions of fans grew louder and louder with each successive MotoGp failure. Rossi, to his credit, remained optimistic and diplomatic, stressing that the team was heading in the right direction. But with each succeeding race and testing session, the signs of frustration and anger became more and more apparent. Rossi seemed to age a lifetime in just one year and his Press Conferences became farcical, even the sycophantic Italians deserting them in droves or failing to attend them at all towards the end of the season. The strain was evident on Rossi’s face as it was on the faces of the team and Rossi’s Maestro, Aussie, Jeremy Burgess.
Preziosi, Ducati’s Team Manager, had said from Day 1, “We are not going to build a Yamaha just to suit Valentino Rossi.” In other words, “We have an engineering and philosophical ideal at work here and we’re not going to change it, even to suit the greatest rider of all time.” The warning bells that sounded right then should have sent Vale and JB running in the opposite direction. Casey Stoner, towards the end of his tenure at Bologna, had expressed similar disappointment that the Ducati people had a certain agenda and didn’t listen to the rider if they felt that he wanted that agenda changed in any way. Of course, the “Casey Haters” simply dismissed that as Casey moaning as he often does (their words, not mine). Time has proven Casey correct and it has come back to haunt The Doctor.
To begin with, though, it seems that the team did everything they could to make the bike a winner for their star recruit. Minor changes were made but seemed not to address the vagueness of the front end (something that had plagued Stoner in his last season with the team) as well as chronic chatter that seemed to appear and disappear for no apparent reason.
So, more dramatic changes were made and it seemed that every new race brought some major change to the bike that would suddenly make it a winner. “Where is the JB magic?” people began to ask, recalling Burgess’s miraculous resurrection of the Yamaha disaster in 2004.
In the end, Ducati ditched the controversial monocoque carbon fibre mini-frame in favour of an aluminium twin-spar effort like everyone else uses. This was a complete denial of the Ducati ethos and effectively made the bike into the Yamaha that Preziosi said he wouldn’t build. But did it turn the bike into a winner? No, it didn’t. In fact it barely troubled the scorers, to use a cricket term, Rossi continuing to languish near the bottom of the top 10 and close to 30 seconds off the race winner’s time right to the end of the season.
“So, that was an 800cc problem, the 1000cc bike will be much better,” the optimists opined. Late-season testing proved that optimism false. Rossi’s testing times were SLOWER than Stoner’s 800cc times and nothing seemed to have changed at all.
Losail 2012. Surely it had to get better. After flinging all the technical expertise they have and millions of sponsorship dollars to boot at the bike, surely Ducati have finally got it right, yes?
Um, no, wrong. Rossi qualified over a second from Lorenzo’s pole time, struggled in the race to stay ahead of the CRT bikes and finished 2nd last of the MotoGp prototype bikes and over 30 seconds behind eventual winner, Lorenzo, a far worse overall performance than 12 months before. Interviewed afterwards, Rossi expressed his frustration, saying that, at one stage, he even considered pulling out of the race but decided not to to keep faith with the team and to help with data acquisition. He said that it was disappointing that the team isn’t accepting his and JB’s input and that he would have to see a considerable improvement in the team’s efforts on his behalf or he’d consider leaving. Incidentally, nobody called him a moaner, even though Casey had been consistently called that throughout 2011 for saying exactly the same thing. 🙂
At Phillip Island last year, BBC commentator Steve Parrish let slip a little gem that the media were shocked to hear. Asked why Valentino wasn’t winning any more, “Stavros” said, “Vale is too old to risk his neck on a crap bike.” For many, this was the truth that all the media conferences and press releases had been trying to hide all year. The bike was/is rubbish and Vale isn’t going to finish his career on the medical scrap heap trying to made it a winner. Ducati may be sure that Rossi will continue to give 100% as he always has, thorough professional that he is, but they have missed the boat in attempting to send The Doctor on to his next motor sporting challenge as an Italian World Champion on an Italian bike. Rossi, as the above picture shows, is a thoroughly dispirited and disappointed man and it has always been his mental toughness that has raised him to a superior level. It is hard to see how that level of intensity and buoyancy can be regained.
Now we have the bizarre news that came out yesterday that Rossi will be competing in a GT car race at Monza this weekend, driving with his good friend Uccio. Pardon? Since when are factory riders permitted to indulge in high-risk motor sports during a racing season? IS Ducati saying, “OK, Vale, we admit it, we’re not going to send you out a winner, go do something that you really enjoy.”?
So, quo vadis, Valentino, where ARE you going? It will be a tragedy if this season, which now assuredly looks to be The Doctor’s last one on two wheels, mirrors last weekend’s performance (or lack of it) at Losail. Champions deserve to go out as winners. I just don’t think that Ducati will be able to provide that courtesy to Valentino Rossi.
