Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128385
do things our way, and I think we probably moved forward more quickly. I'm sure Valentino would have been successful with or without me. He's that sort of person. If he wants to do it, he'll do it. Perhaps it would have taken half a season to swing Yamaha around from the way they were thinking. However, on the other hand, they may have changed their thinking immediately. They gave us a very, very open book to start with ~nd work the way we wanted to work. But I think a lot a lot of this credit has to go further up the chain. You don't rebuild companies from the bottom up. You rebuild them from the top down. And Mr. [Masao] Furosawa, by getting Valentino Rossi on board through David Brivio, then bringing the team in, really brought in a group of people who had experience, and the results speak for themselves. I think Mr. Furosawa's skills are in management and organizing products that haven't been at full strength for some time, and I think the snowmobile effort was his last major turnaround. They brought somebody in, and when they do the major reshuffle, it seems to create the major shakeup that it's taken 10 years to sort of get in the hole. To my way of thinking, at the Grand Prix level of Yamaha, there was no belief there that they could beat Honda. They always just accepted that they couldn't. We went in there with an attitude of winning, which I've always had, and we just got people thinking toward the end of the year - and, yes, it was possible. I remember the dinners we had at the beginning of the year, and we'd have a few beers and make these statements that we're going to go out and crush them. We never went there to race; we went there to win. My feeling on the subject - and Valentino said earlier in the year, 'Jeremy was more confident than I was' - my feeling was that we missed a golden opportunity to win the championship in 2000 in the first year when we were given the numberfour status at Honda. And Kenny [Roberts] Jr. won the title. We went on to finish second. But had we been given equal status at the beginning, we wouldn't have had perhaps some of those problems we had in the first couple of races with Valentino, and we may have won that championship. My point is, if you go at it from the beginning and get beaten, you've given it your best shot. If you go into it - as perhaps could have been done this year with the intention of planning for 2005, we very well may have lost another opportunity. I was quite happy to go as hard as we could all year and get beaten or just go as hard as we could and win it, which is what happened. ringing, and we were 15 points behind Sete [Gibernau] at that stage. And then, in the next three races he won. So we dragged ourselves back from behind, not out of touch completely but being behind. We certainly didn't want to have three bad races - Mugello, Barcelona and Assen - otherwise, we might have been staring down the barrel of perhaps a 35-point deficit. Then to go to Brazil and fall off the bike, give away another opportunity, have a bad race in Sachsenring, a good race in Donington ... he never lost sight of the actual point that you're accumulating points. Each time we ran at many of these circuits, we stayed behind for two days afterward, so we effectively turned them into five-day events. The focus towards the end of the season was incredible. Sete and them all but rolled over. Valentino seems to have the others beaten before the race, You have Plan A, and if Plan A doesn't work, you slip into Plan B, because you never know what's going to happen. Certainly in those faster races in the middle of the season - Assen, Mugello, Barcelona - we couldn't That comes down to race craft. It comes from intelligence and understanding what 30 laps is all about. The physical level changes for the rider. The concentration level has to change if you're not physically fit. There's more than just the machine. Iwould say the machine, other than the tires, remains very constant. The suspension's not the problem it was perhaps 20 years ago. And these bikes behave pretty much the same, other than the traction side of it and the edge grip, pretty much the whole way through the race, which is perhaps something the two-strokes didn't even do as they richened up. The rider is the most important thing, and Valentino certainly has a level of concentration perhaps one or two steps higher than anybody I've ever seen on a motorcycle, I would have to say, knowing the situations we've been in. Mick [Doohan) had a fierce determination, and he had his competitors beaten sort of in the pit lane because he seldom spoke or hung out with his major competitors. Valentino has a lot of humility but a certain ability to concentrate and to do things that in my mind, I still sit back and say, 'That was unbelievable: probably as much as many of the fans do. What he's done on the Yamaha is a point in case. "I've seen a few of them, and this guy does it with an ease that I find very difficult to come to grips with, and he's not absolutely flat-out exhausted at the end of the race." - Jeremy Burgess How does Valentino maintain his equanimity? He's never changed. What I really do appreciate and enjoy about Valentino is the way he can ride the highs and lows of the season. We had the massive high in South Africa [in 2004], then backed it up by a rather average performance in the rain in Jerez. They got the shot on us in a way; they showed us how bad the bike was in the rain, within a fortnight of showing us how good it was. So, we were able to work on that problem through the course of the year. Then we went to Le Mans, and he finished fourth. No great alarm bells were afford at any stage to have two or three Hondas in front of us, because we could only really deal with only one at a time on anyone lap. If we were in third or fourth and Sete was scooting away in the front, our ability to deal with two Hondas before we got to Sete would have been very, very difficult. So it was important that we were in first or second position all the time in those races. To his credit, he [Rossi] was. From that point of view, he was able to tackle Sete fairly well. There's a big difference, and I think Sete suffers from it to a degree: It's that he feels that when he's leading the race, he's winning the race. Valentino Rossi is still quite in control on many of the circuits when he's in second or third. He's aware of how many laps to run, what he's capable of doing. Valentino controls the race, regardless of his position, There's a lot to be said for that. I think times are changing. I think perhaps the only string in Sete's bow is to go as fast as he can early, knowing full well that Valentino's good at the end. It's really a lot of how their minds work. Sete's and Max's [Biaggi] works the other way. Max likes to make a break and then get into his rhythm, and then he's very hard to beat. Valentino is perhaps more in the Kenny [Roberts Sr.] mold. He can sit behind the guy in front of him, and if somebody else goes faster, there's very little he can do about it - see where he is at the end of the 30 laps. To win nine races on a bike for a company who's never won nine races in a season - to win the championship for them, and the second-place Yamaha finishing in essentially the same position it always has - you have to say the difference is the rider. To me that's a big difference. You'll never get any other rider to admit that one guy might be better than he is, particularly an ex-champion. I've seen a few of them, and this guy does it with an ease that I find very difficult to come to grips with, and he's not absolutely flat-out exhausted at the end of the race. He still has time for his little tricks with his fan-club mates. I never saw [Giacomo] Agostini or [Mike] Hailwood in their heyday, but there are other Yamahas up there and there are other good bikes. I have to be very careful as to who's the best; being an Australian, it's quite a tricky situation. But I think Wayne Gardner more or less has admitted that Valentino's head and shoulders above anybody he's ever known. When Valentino retires, somebody's going to ask me one day who was the best? In five-plus years now, he's scored 46 [prior to Assen] top-level victories. Mick in II years scored 54. Do we make judgments based on performance or what? It's really hard. I think everybody, every journalist, every motorcycling enthusiast has their own opinions, but I can't see how anybody cannot rate him up there in the very, very best ever. What will it take to beat him? I think they have to find out what his weakness is. He hasn't exposed a weakness yet, except perhaps in season 2003, where there seemed to be a lack of competition for him and then he made silly mistakes, and really those mistakes in those couple of races with Sete in the first half of 2003 perhaps gave Sete Grand Prixs that necessarily he shouldn't really have gotten. However, to his credit, when you give a sucker an even break, you CYCLE NEWS • JULY 6, 2005 49