MotoGP, Rossi: Marquez always reserves special treatment for me

Carefully mix the right choice of front tyre, the instinct for hand-to-hand combat, a bit of rust for a special rival in various senses and you get Rossi’s race at Silvertone. In fact, maybe an ingredient is missing. “Ignorance - laughs Rossi - We always say it in Bulega: every now and then it’s you riding the bike and every now and then it’s the ignorant person inside you. Today I was ignorant too.”

In the dry you did not seem competitive. What happened today?
“I struggled a lot this weekend and I knew that I would have to take advantage of starting from the front row. What let me go fast until the end was putting on the hard front tyre.”

Was it a gamble?
“I knew that tyre and I usually like it, but I hadn’t tried it. If I hadn’t chosen it, I would have finished much farther back.”

And instead you finished on the podium…
“And it is important, much more than the three points I gained over Marquez, that don’t change the situation. I really had fun battling with Marc, Iannone and Cal. In fact, if Viñales had waited for us we could have had even more fun (he laughs).”

Let’s talk about the battle with Marquez then…
“He always reserves special treatment for me, but even against Iannone it is not easy (he laughs). I know how he rides. He is very aggressive. We touched a couple times, but he never went beyond a clean battle. I saw him go off track and I don’t think it’s fair that when a rider makes a mistake he can come back on the track without losing anything, but the rules say he can and it’s the same for everyone.”

A different story compared to the past?
“It was a very different duel from the one in Sepang because today we both had the same goal: finishing ahead of the other. I was faster in some parts of the track and he was faster in others, so a nice battle came out of it. I really had fun.”

At a certain point it seemed like you could have pulled away…
“When I was 2nd I thought I could chase down Viñales, but after a few good laps I had to back off. I had five riders right behind me and I knew that it would be a fight down to the end.”

Were you struggling that much?
“I think I was the one who was struggling the most. Thanks to the hard front tyre I was able to brake hard, but in the fast right-handers I lost a lot.”

Three points earned, 50 to go…
“And only six races. Maybe it’s even worse than before but it isn’t important. My goal is to get on the podium and try to win from here until the end of the season. It would make me happy to succeed. For the championship the situation is very difficult.”

You earned 8 points over Lorenzo…
“This is important. He is usually very fast on this track. He made a different tyre choice than I did.”

Could that be a warning flag on Yamaha’s competitiveness?
“Here we were slower than Honda and Suzuki and even Ducati gave us some problems. In the first part of the season, we were more competitive. We need to understand what happened.”

Starting from Misano…
“That is a track where the M1 usually performs well. It will be the most special and important Grand Prix of the season. I’ll be under a lot of pressure, but there will also be a great atmosphere. It will be one of those occasions where we’ll give 100%.”