Casey Stoner has weighed in on the Valentino Rossi-Marc Marquez spat that has dominated headlines on-and-off in MotoGP since 2015. It’s a feud that still captures the raging imagination of fans from across the MotoGP spectrum even 10 years on, especially as Marquez now prepares to team up with Rossi’s protege, Francesco Bagnaia, at Ducati this year. For Stoner, it’s also one in which Marquez has “deserved” the criticism levelled by some at him. “Marc [Marquez], to a certain degree, deserved his criticism,” Stoner said on the Ducati Diaries podcast. “He tried to get in there.” Stoner affirmed, though, that the blame for the whole spat lay at Rossi’s door – Marquez was simply responding to an attack. “Even though people blame Marc for the whole thing,” Stoner said, “people forget that Valentino [Rossi] started it. “Marc’s Marc, we’ve watched him do that all through his racing, and then Valentino started a war of words. “They were all friends, and all the rest of it, then Valentino started something, and then Marc retaliated because he didn’t like it. “And then of course everybody blows up about that, forgetting that Valentino went and poked the bear.” Stoner explained that the fallout […]
Nine years after the fact, only one person can truly take the blame for Valentino Rossi not winning the 2015 MotoGP world title. And it’s him. The nine-time world champion has never wavered from his stance that Marc Marquez conspired against him to ensure Jorge Lorenzo won the 2015 crown. It’s a view that has radicalised a portion of the MotoGP fanbase and is the main reason a chorus of boos tends to follow Marquez around whenever he races in front of former Rossi strongholds. It is a cloud that has forever hung over MotoGP since that Malaysian Grand Prix weekend almost a decade ago and one, sadly, that shows no signs of ever disappearing after Rossi stoked the fires again earlier this week. Taking to the ‘Mig Babol’ podcast – a show hosted by former VR46 Academy rider and current VR46 Racing team rider coach and video analyst Andrea Migno – Rossi doubled down on his rhetoric about 2015. He reiterated why he called out Marquez in the pre-event Sepang press conference after ‘irrefutable’ proof of conspiracy was discovered at Phillip Island the week before. He doubled down on the fact that, in the Malaysian GP, Marquez tried to […]
