Opinion: Lewis Duncan
The legendary Italian has finally decided to retire from the pinnacle of motorcycle racing, but his impact on the sport will continue
“For years Dorna has hung its fanbase marketing on ‘Come for Rossi, stay for the show’”
Valentino Rossi’s impact on Motogp and motorsport as a whole can never be overstated. From the genesis of his career, in the footsteps of his ex-grand prix motorcycle racing father Graziano, the world watched with great expectancy. Through his nine world titles (seven of which were in the premier class), 115 grand prix wins, his 235 podiums, his bitter rivalries with Max Biaggi, Sete Gibernau, Casey Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo and Marc Marquez, Rossi has been the driving force behind Motogp’s popularity in the 21st century.
Go to just about any town in the world and you’ll be sure to find someone with a VR46 T-shirt. In PRE-COVID times, the battalion of yellow-clad punters filling grandstand seats and yellow-smoke-bathed hillsides ensured any roof – both physical and metaphorically – would be torn off.
Motogp’s viewership across Europe effortlessly reaches millions. For years Dorna has hung its marketing to expand its fanbase on a‘come for Rossi, stay for the show’policy, even as his results began to dry up. A slow Rossi has been better than no Rossi.
Since his 2015 title challenge dramatically fell off the rails amid a haze of paranoid conspiracy theories surrounding his rivals Marquez and Lorenzo, Rossi hasn’t been quite the same. In 2016 he managed two wins and was runner-up in the standings again, but he won just once in 2017 and hasn’t visited the top of the rostrum since that year’s Dutch TT. In 2018 he managed five podiums. In 2019 that tally fell to two, while last year he managed just one amid a season largely influenced by a poor Yamaha and the latter half of his year being wrecked by COVID-19.
So far this season, he’s finished no higher than 10th, amassing just 20 points from the first 10 races. It’s his worst season ever in grand prix racing. Only twice has he outqualified team-mate Franco Morbidelli (who is riding a two-year-old bike), the average gap between the pair on Saturdays a whopping 0.639 seconds.
This is through no lack of trying on Rossi’s part, though. After a difficult 2019, Rossi ditched crew chief Silvano Galbusera and elected to work with Motogp novice David Munoz in the hope that a young, fresh perspective could help him break through again. Third in a punishing Jerez race, top-fives at Brno and the Red Bull
Ring as other Yamaha riders struggled, and competitive runs at Misano and at Barcelona proved his off-track efforts had worked.
His results have taken a nosedive in 2021, despite being on a Yamaha M1 that is vastly improved over its predecessor. But this can largely be traced to the rear tyre construction from Michelin, which got softer in 2020.
Such fine margins make the biggest difference in Motogp, so it’s no wonder Rossi, now 42, has fallen further back. But still he has pushed to find a way around his problems, putting 72 laps on the board during the post-barcelona GP test in June. Whether retirement was on his mind or not, it showed Rossi wasn’t resigned to simply fading away if 2021 was to be his last.
Still, people will say Rossi is retiring a couple of years too late. While it’s hard to see such a legend struggling to crack the top 10, he has made every effort in recent years to extract the best from himself and last year at least proved the pace for the podium is still very much there – not that he has anything left to prove.
A bad final season will do nothing to diminish the Rossi legend, which has been hard-earned by the Italian, and he will continue to inspire young riders coming up into the world of motorcycle racing for many more years.
That is evident in his VR46 Riders Academy. Established in 2014 in an attempt to overturn the dearth of top Italian talent in grand prix racing, Rossi has guided two riders – Morbidelli and Francesco Bagnaia – to world titles in Moto2, provided a ladder into Motogp for Morbidelli, Bagnaia and Luca Marini, and has nurtured Marco Bezzecchi, who is set to become his fourth Academy rider to step up to the top class next year.
Of course, Rossi’s legacy also has black patches that must not be ignored when looking back over his career, such as the bitterness that erupted with Marquez in 2015, or erecting a wall in the Yamaha garage in 2008 to stop data spilling into Lorenzo’s side of the team.
In the short term, Rossi still has a massive role to play for Motogp. As COVID restrictions begin to lift across Europe, Motogp is welcoming back bigger crowds. With 2021 now a farewell tour for Rossi, Dorna shouldn’t struggle to sell tickets, offering a boost to Motogp and local economies alike.
For a quarter of a century, Rossi has made history and changed the face of Motogp forever. Motogp must now look to a future without its biggest draw of the past two decades. The series is strong enough to weather whatever comes the way of the post-rossi Motogp era, though it must now focus on making stars of its current talent crop.
But for now, Motogp can marvel in the incredible career of a charismatic figure, the like of which we may never see again.