MotoGP News
Date: 10/1/2012
MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi intends to sign at least one more contract before retirement, but that will do little to reduce the pressure on his Ducati team heading into the 2012 season.
Rossi, the most popular motorcycle rider of all time and winner of 93 races and nine world championships, saw a dream switch to home Italian manufacturer backfire spectacularly last year.
The 32-year-old scored just one podium finish as he limped home seventh in the standings and failed to win a race for the first time since his world championship debut in 1996.
“I would like to help Ducati achieve something then maybe stop,” said Rossi of his MotoGP future. “We started this project and want to win something.
“But I would like at least one more contract. So another two years [after 2012].”
The MotoGP rider market will open up at the end of this year, with all of the top riders out of contract, but Rossi has already ridden for both Honda and Yamaha - the only other factories remaining in MotoGP.
“This season will be interesting because all of the top riders’ contracts are up at the end of the year, so the cards could be reshuffled,” he said.
Rossi added that a return to a Japanese manufacturer was "not very likely, but who knows? I won’t say it’s impossible…”
Taking his long awaited 80th premier-class win will be the main focus for Rossi and Ducati this year - and should be enough to keep him at the team beyond 2012.
In pursuit of that goal many of the unique characteristics of the Ducati motorcycle - such as extensive structural use of carbon fibre - were progressively removed during last season.
The Desmosedici will become even more like a Japanese motorcycle for 2012 through the use of a conventional aluminium frame.
Winter development is continuing at such a pace that the traditional unveiling of the new bike at this week’s Wrooom press ski meeting at Madonna di Campiglio has been abandoned.
Instead the GP12, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated motorcycle in Rossi’s career, won’t be seen in public until the first test session of the year, in Malaysia at the end of the month.
For now Rossi’s expectations are cautious: "I don't want to say that I can't fight for the title, but we have to be realistic. At the end of last year we were still 1.5sec a lap behind, so the first target is simply to be closer to the front.
"This bike is very different from last year’s so it will be impossible to be competitive from the very first test. However we should be ready for the first race.”
Ducati won the world championship with Casey Stoner in 2007 and was a race winner with the Australian every season until he departed for Honda, and promptly won his second crown, in 2011.
But Stoner’s talent masked fundamental handling problems with the Desmosedici that not even Rossi could overcome. Rossi believes part of the problem is the narrow margin for design variation possible following MotoGP’s switch to a single tyre supplier in 2009.
"What is important in MotoGP is making the Bridgestone tyres work well. This is where we’ve suffered and where we’ve been working,” said Rossi.
2012 will be a big year for MotoGP in general, with a change to 1000cc engines and a new class of privateer Claiming Rule Team bikes joining the grid.
These controversial cut-price machines, powered by Superbike-based engines, will race under slightly different technical rules to the full prototypes - but are in danger of being left substantially off the pace.
Unlike some of his rivals, Rossi is pragmatic enough to realise MotoGP currently has little alternative.
"In a perfect world there would be 24 factory-built bikes on the grid, but without CRT there would be only 12 bikes this year. So we need CRT," he said.
One thing that hasn’t changed, Rossi insists, is his desire for victory.
“The new generation of riders are younger and very strong, but I’m still very fast and my hunger is the same,” he warned.
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