Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 8 FEBRUARY 25, 2014 P79 Yamaha for 2014 when Valentino Rossi fired him as crew chief. Rather than attending the post-race testing sessions for the 2014 season he was on his way to catch a final flight back to Australia, closing the curtain on his amazingly long ca- reer on the world stage of motorcycle racing. "To me, as much as I wouldn't have made such a call, the fact that the call has been made leaves me very much at ease," Bur- gess says. "Having the one-year contract continue is not a bad thing. The more I get used to it [a year on full pay with no immedi- ate responsibility] the more comfortable I be- come about it all." MotoGP's final round at Valencia caught the motorcycle world's imagination. Span- ish teenager Marc Marquez was poised to become an unlikely World Champion in his rookie year. While defending champion Jorge Lorenzo was planning a desperate last-ditch defense. But the big news was Mo- toGP folk hero Valentino Rossi's very public divorce from "JB," the straight-shooting crew chief who had guided him to seven of his nine World Championship titles. From the outside it seemed like a spur-of- the-moment decision handled in an embar- rassingly clumsy way. Burgess sees it differently. "Certainly I was blindsided by the timing of the decision, as I said at the time, but there was a basic difference between the way Val- entino and I intended to continue on in Mo- toGP," he says. "He was keen to continue to perhaps 2016-2017 and we discussed this, but I was not prepared to commit so far ahead. "I was more than happy with a year-by-year contract so he probably felt a lack of commit- ment. I thought that for me it was the honest way to go forward." Rumors had been swirling around the Ital- ian media in the lead-up to Valencia, forcing JB ON ROSSI'S AGE AND NOT WINNING: "Does not winning tarnish the image? Look at Barry Sheene. He won his two world titles in 1976 and 1977 and was still racing in 1984. at answers your question, but at the age of 35 Rossi won't be gaining many new fans this season. Right now the 10-year-olds are putting Marc Marquez posters up on their bedroom walls." JB ON MARC MARQUEZ'S RAPID RISE: "He's raced through the junior ranks to earn ex- perience and learned a lot from watching Valentino Rossi. Look at the overtaking carbon-copy move at Laguna Seca's Corkscrew. Valentino likes him and I think he'd be happy to hand over the mantle of popularity to him." JB ON BEING AN OUTSPOKEN MOTOGP INSIDER: "As Carmelo Espeleta [Dorna's CEO] and I said the day I left, we haven't always agreed but that fact alone shows we're both think- ing about MotoGP." JB ON CRT RACING: "For too long the Grand Prix senior class has been the same scenario: Honda, Yamaha and a bit of Suzuki. CRT did a wonderful job showing chassis could be made in Europe. It created mini- industries and took us back to the interesting era of the 1960s-70s." JB ON ROSSI'S FIRST WIN WITH YAMAHA: "We [Rossi, JB and his team of technicians] came in with the confidence of winning. A lot of the European Yamaha technicians were in awe of Honda, but we knew Honda inside out and also knew that in a lot of areas the Ya- maha was actually better." JB ON HOW HE SAW THE ROSSI PARTNERSHIP CONTINUING. "My long-term focus in 2013 was to stay with Valentino and help him out as long as I thought I was doing a good job. I wanted to get him out of the sport in good physi- cal condition with all limbs intact, etc." JB ON AUSTRALIA'S MOTOGP LEGACY: "I'm proud to have been part of the Wayne Gardner world title that brought the impetus to Phillip Island being able to host a world round, as well as being involved in more than 160 Grand Prix wins. I admire SBS for covering the sport and then Channel Nine for taking it off them, confirming the commercial value of it. en along came [Mick] Doohan and [Casey] Stoner. By then Australians had embraced a truly world sport. We host MotoGP, F1 cars, world surfing at Bells and the Open tennis and golf. Forget cricket and rugby test series between two or three nations, these are the truly international sports we host."

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