The Feud

This week I’m going to talk about the two personalities that are slugging it out at the top of the Championship and their constantly evolving relationship as this season’s titanic battle unravels. Obviously I’m talking about Valentino Rossi ‘The Doctor’ and Jorge Lorenzo ‘Student Doctor’.

I’m currently engrossed in Jorge Lorenzo’s book My Story so Far that has been so expertly translated recently into English by Matthew Roberts. The young Mallorcan title challenger is clearly a very complex character and splits fans opinions into two clear groups: Those who love him and those who hate him. His book reveals his complex upbringing guided by his Father Chicho who Jorge painfully discarded from his racing career affairs to then be mentored by ex-racer Dani Amatriain, who guided the young Jorge to back-to-back 250cc world titles and through to another public and painful split during his rookie MotoGP campaign, from Amatriain last year.

As the battle between the two Fiat Yamaha pilots intensifies to a level that hasn’t been seen since Valentino defeated Sete Gibernau in 2003/2004, so does their complex relationship. As Valentino pointed out here at the pre-event press conference, “It is the media that is talking about this because they want us to fight, but for me I want a normal relationship with Lorenzo away from the track.” I can probably be added to that list now as well, but after reading Jorge’s book and observing how both riders interact with each other, I want to share this with you.

As a young boy Jorge had the posters of Max Biaggi adorning his bedroom walls but this led to big arguments with his father who favored up and coming Valentino Rossi at the time. “Jorge, if you have to look up to somebody, focus on the best...and that’s not Biaggi. You can have your own heroes, but the best of the lot is Rossi,” he is quoted as saying in the book. And after meeting Max Biaggi in his first season as a 15-year-old Derbi rider, Jorge started taking more of an interest in the more popular and charismatic Valentino.

Jorge is a very smart and savvy rider. He knows that Vale won’t be racing for ever and he has the big advantage of age, eight years, over the older Rossi. Racing is not just about how good your results are on the track. Popularity amongst the fans opens up for more opportunities to make it as a world-wide superstar and to be known beyond just MotoGP fans. Jorge has used specialist psychology coaches to analyze Valentino’s psychomorphology, the way a person can transmit their character through their facial expressions and posture. Jorge could see that fans wouldn’t warm to him in the same way as Vale because his expressions made him look serious and he didn’t have the same carefree smiling and happy character.

Jorge could also see how popular and talked about Vale’s post race celebrations were, so he decided to try some for himself. “If Rossi hadn’t started celebrating like he does then maybe it would never have occurred to me. Who knows? Obviously he was an inspiration to me in the beginning. The thing is they were so good, and there were so many... They were so funny and so smart. I had a few ideas and I thought it could be good fun but I never did anything thinking that I could become Valentino Rossi the second.”

In his 250 championship-winning years Jorge has dressed his personal trainer Marcos Hirsch and Father Chicho as doubles of himself in full riding kit, then dressed himself in a boxing robe and gold gloves in parc ferme after delivering the final knockout punch to his rivals. He regularly leaps up on the podium after a win, Formula 1 star Michael Schumacher-style, and plants a ‘Lorenzo's Land’ flag in front of his official fan club on his victory laps.

His rookie MotoGP campaign started last year with a bang, putting it on pole at the first three rounds and winning at Estoril before an ankle-crunching high-side in China and being knocked unconscious for his home Spanish round at Catalunya dented his confidence. He then mainly played second fiddle to Valentino for the remainder of the year as the Doctor regained his MotoGP title after a two-year gap.

This year ‘Spanish George’ has started more sedately, but in Japan scored his first win of the year in a straight fight with VR on a dry track. In a wet/dry race in Le Mans it was Rossi who crashed out on his first lap on slicks and the young pretender Jorge who romped to a mistake-free victory. Then their biggest fight to date in Lorenzo’s backyard of Catalunya commenced. If you haven’t seen the race yet, it’s a no-brainer, an absolute classic of a last lap, last-corner maneuver from Rossi that will be talked about for decades.

Something very interesting happened in front of the main grandstand before the podium ceremony. Vale responded to the anti-Lorenzo fans and leapt the pit wall, walked across the track to greet his Spanish Fans. Jorge clocked this while he was conducting an interview with Spanish TV in parc ferme. Directly after he finished he too leapt the pit wall in exactly the same way as Vale but went one better by climbing the fence that surrounds the track to greet his fans and stick two fingers up at Rossi. The copy-cat tit-for-tat actions and mind games have also included Jorge pausing during a live front row press conference and glaring at Vale while he does his usual trick of talking to a fellow Italian while somebody else is talking.

VR only refers to Jorge as ‘Lorenzo’; a sure sign that VR sees Jorge as his main threat. He also dropped the friendly first names of Gibernau and Melandri when they became serious Championship threats.

Rumor has it that Vale had heard that Jorge had said that he wanted to beat Rossi in the last corner of his home Grand Prix. Vale had ripped this page out and kept reading it over and over again prior to that nail-biting battle.

The intensity of these mind games are sure to ramp up as the season pans out with neither of them prepared to back down. We’re in for a treat!


The Final Visit

This Donington race was the last ever, for at least five years, as next year we swap with F1 and go to Silverstone on a yet-to-be-built new track layout. Donington will get an F1 makeover and a new infield loop stadium section. Thankfully, to the relief of everybody but particularly the riders, if we should return in the future the historic and iconic sweeping section from Redgate through to Coppice will remain. We lose the Mickey Mouse car park section that was added to make it up to the required FIM Grand Prix length which completes the lap.

General feeling about the place varies in the paddock. Memories include everything from Wayne Rainey’s and Valentino Rossi’s maiden blue-ribbon class wins to Schwantz crashing on oil at Redgate in ’93, watching his rivals pile in behind him before snatching an oil flag from a dozing corner worker and waving it himself! But the majority of people would like the track lifted away before a bomb is dropped on the place replacing the archaic facilities that have mainly remained since the track was reopened in the late '70s. A few years ago when a new company came in to lease the circuit from the Wheatcroft family an investment of 3 million provided new pit boxes that resemble fancy cow sheds and a media center where cell phones don’t work and a center ‘viewing area’ that resembles the Somme!

The Race

Today’s race ended up as a complete lottery, with light rain falling as the bikes left the pit lane on their sighting lap. Everybody but the Ducati boys went with slicks on a surface that would have suited the unavailable intermediate choice. When the lights went out everybody held their breath while cold slicks scrabbled around on Donington's notoriously slippery surface and it was the riders with the biggest kahunnas that were rewarded in those early tentative laps.

A group containing Toni Elias, the two Fiat Yamaha pilots, the Repsol Honda duo, Randy de Puniet, home hope James Toseland and Marco Melandri started to gap the rest of the field. Elias was the first to fall victim to the lack of adhesion on Lap 8, crashing out of fifth. Lorenzo and Rossi looked set for another ding-dong as the Fiat Yamaha’s set the pace. Jorge then crashed out of the lead on Lap 9, touching the paint under braking for the final corner.

“I got a good start and the first few laps went well, I was feeling quite comfortable in the lead,” he said. “Unfortunately on the final corner of the ninth lap I made a small mistake, got my line wrong and touched the white line and there was nothing I could do, it was very slippery”

The bike buried itself into the barriers, deeming it too badly damaged to continue. Rossi inherited the lead and broke with Andrea Dovizioso who was reveling in the tricky conditions and tracking Rossi closely, using him as his gauge of how hard to push. But on Lap 20 the same fate hit Vale as his young Spanish teammate.

“Once Jorge had crashed I was riding to win, as always my style,” commented The Doctor. “In hindsight maybe I should have let Dovi pass me for a while but it was difficult to judge in such strange conditions. Riding in the rain with slick tires is always a risk and it was quite slippery, the turns on the left were all wet which made the left side of the tire cold and that’s why I crashed. Luckily it was a small fall and my bike wasn’t hurt much. In fact, my bike was ‘bravissima’ today both before and after the crash! After that we made a great recovery, I chose to remain with slick tires despite the rain and the result was eleven points, which are like gold dust for us because we have extended the lead.”

The rider of the race could arguably be Colin Edwards. Languishing at the back of the pack in the early laps as he struggled with an unfamiliar feel to his front slick, once that kicked in he started ‘to ride like a demon’ according to Rossi.
“That was a pretty intense 48 minutes but at the start there was no way I thought I was going to be on the podium,” Edwards said. “I'm not sure what happened at the start but I just had guys coming by everywhere. I was using a front tire I'd not used all weekend and it took me a while to get a feel for it. Once I got some momentum going and I started to understand how the front tire was feeling I started pushing my way through. But with about seven or eight laps to go I started having some big moments because it was hard to know where it was raining and where it wasn't. I could see I was catching Randy really quick and we got into a good battle. He was faster than me in some parts and I was better in others but luckily I passed him on the last lap and made it stick. By that time though Andrea was too far ahead to think about pushing on for that first win, but second is a great way to finish at Donington.”

Ducati riders Casey Stoner and Nicky Hayden finished at the back of the field with egg on their face after both gambling to go with wets in the hope that the rain would fall heavier, but both were philosophical about the gamble.

Nicky said: “I had nothing to lose so we rolled the dice. The odds were against me but it was so close to paying off. It rained throughout the race but the track was so warm the moisture wasn’t accumulating on the ground and unfortunately that spelt disaster for us. I take full responsibility for the decision.”

We now have a much anticipated ‘summer break’ until we regroup in the Czech Republic at Brno. Valentino will be surely taking his normal trip to the small Spanish party Island of Ibiza, where he can relax at his beach house with a handy 25-point lead over his teammate. After Vale’s great escape today, it seems that when it rains the sun still shines on Valentino.