And lo it came to pass that Valentino Rossi didn’t get his tenth world title today at the Valencia MotoGP round. Which for a lot of the people at the track and millions watching around the world was a shame. It was always going to be difficult but he rode the best race he could, got himself to fourth and had to rely on new nemesis Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa to get in front of Jorge Lorenzo.
Which they didn’t. And the conspiracy theories, led by former MotoGP rider and World Superbike Champion Neil Hodgson, began.
Marquez only put moves on one person in the whole affair, and that was team-mate Pedrosa - once at the start of the race and once at the end. The only talk in the Valencia paddock right now is that Marquez and Honda were in cahoots with Lorenzo and Dorna to make sure Lorenzo became champion - to the point where he stopped a charging Pedrosa getting onto Lorenzo’s back wheel and potentially winning the race.
There are merits to that argument. Marquez has never been shy of putting risky or downright dangerous moves on people in the past and sometimes those passes have ended up with the passee in the gravel. Or hospital. So why not put one or two on Lorenzo, or even show him a wheel? Good question. Why stop Pedrosa from getting to a place where he could put a move on Lorenzo, and potentially take the one-two result that has been requested by HRC boss Nakamoto-san. Even better question. The answers will never be forthcoming.
Was it a Honda/Dorna conspiracy to secure a Spanish World Champion? Doubtful in the extreme. Dorna are a professional outfit and have paymasters like everyone else - in their case private equity firm Bridgepoint - to answer to. If there was any suspicion that Dorna had deliberately removed the chance of their cash cow, Valentino Rossi, taking a tenth title, then fairly serious questions would be asked and then the sack taken around. Rossi makes Dorna a fortune. A massive majority of the crowd - in any country - turns up to see him alone. That’s a lot of tickets and TV money.
Would Honda get involved in such a thing? No. Why is it in their interest to have Lorenzo as champion instead of Rossi? It matters not an ounce to them, and someone as senior as Nakamoto wouldn’t allow his team to lower themselves to dirty tricks in order to invoke some sort of revenge for Sepang.
The real reason Marquez didn’t even attempt to pass Lorenzo will probably never be known - he did say before the race he wouldn’t be doing anything risky - but a pact to deny Rossi a title at the expense of a one-two result in front of many senior Honda officials - ones much further up the food chain than Nakamoto - is not even a theory. It’s nonsense.
