INTERVIEW
JEREMY BURGESS
P80
Rossi into making the announce-
ment no one wanted to believe
on the Thursday before the race.
Surely that made the last Mo-
toGP a bittersweet occasion for
Burgess?
"Not at all," he says. "It would
have been terrible to have run
that last race and then had Val-
entino call me aside and say,
'thanks, but I'll see you later.' "
Burgess says he called the
press conference after Rossi's
Thursday's statement to clear the
air.
"I didn't want a trail of report-
ers tapping on the back of the
shed all weekend to get my side
of things," he says.
That left Burgess free to con-
centrate on his last race with Ros-
si. Sadly, it pretty much summed
up the season.
"When Lorenzo slowed
the race down I hoped Valen-
tino would be able to seize the
chance and add another dimen-
sion by providing Marquez with a
challenge he wasn't expecting,"
says Burgess.
But Rossi was unable to help
his teammate defend his points
tally and remained stuck in a tight
little group of Honda Gresini's
Alvaro Bautista and Marquez's
Honda teammate Dani Pedrosa.
When Pedrosa dispatched
Rossi and Bautista, Lorenzo real-
ized he was on his own and no
one could stop Marquez cruising
to a world title as the youngest-
ever champion and the first rook-
ie winner since Kenny Roberts in
1978.
Burgess elaborates on anoth-
er major difference that had de-
veloped between him and Rossi.
"Valentino loves the whole
process of going racing and en-
joys the riding almost as much as
winning," he says. "To me it's all
about winning so to stay there in
MotoGP to go through that expe-
rience of not winning is a vastly
different world to what I've lived
in for the past 34 years.
"My attitude has always been
if you are not going to win, stay
home. During our time with Duca-
ti I often felt we weren't even in
the same race as the top three.
A lot of European MotoGP tech-
nicians consider racing as a job,
but to me and all the other Auss-
ies I know who work over there
the motivation is winning.
"If I just wanted to be involved
in racing I wouldn't have to leave
South Australia. I could go out
to Mallala and watch a rider go
around in a local event. The skills
level might be different, but it all
equals itself out and even at a
lower level than MotoGP it's still
great racing to watch.
"No, there are a lot of people
who race and enjoy it but for me
it's all about winning."
