MotoGP | Pedrosa: “With a bit of luck I would have won two titles, maybe three”

Dani Pedrosa was promoted to MotoGP by Honda in 2006, after winning three consecutive world championships, one in the 125cc class and two in the quarter-litre class. After his debut in the Movistar Cup and years in the lower classes, the championship saw the Spaniard as a potential MotoGP champion, a potential Spanish Mick Doohan.

However, injuries, bad luck and the emergence of a rider no one had thought of in 2006, compatriot Jorge Lorenzo, who arrived in MotoGP in 2008 as a double 250cc champion, closed the door on Pedrosa’s world championship ambitions.

The current KTM test rider and successful TV commentator was the main guest on the podcast “Por Orejas” on Motorsport Network and for almost an hour it provided very interesting insights.

While Pedrosa projected the image of a rider sculpted to win the title, Lorenzo gave the impression, when he arrived in the World Championship paddock, of being an “abandoned puppy”. In the end, however, it was a bit of a topsy-turvy world: while the Majorcan won three titles, Pedrosa never did so, maintaining an extreme rivalry with him for years, which has now fortunately been redirected.

“I think Jorge deserves what he won. I mean, I don’t want to take anything away from him, on the contrary,” Pedrosa explains in the podcast. “In my case, if just a couple of things had gone well, I would have been a two-time world champion easily, maybe three times,” he adds.

With the benefit of experience and hindsight, Pedrosa admits that not everything was done well on his part at the time.

“We did things very well in 125cc and 250cc, but then we didn’t know how to adapt well to the media environment, we were still very closed in what was the style that had worked for us in 125cc and 250cc, but MotoGP has a different atmosphere,” he explains.

“You have to get into the media game because your rivals do it and in that case there was Valentino Rossi, who was unquestionably a crack in that area. And whether you like it or not, even if you have a different character, like Casey Stoner, who is also different, very closed like me, you have to know how to manage that atmosphere a little bit, and we didn’t do it well. I’m not saying it was the cause of everything, but when you’re expected to do something so difficult to achieve and you don’t know how to handle things when they go wrong, it becomes more and more of a burden.”

Now that he is more familiar with the media, especially as a commentator, Pedrosa believes that at the time it would have been better if he had had “a little more mental flexibility to adapt more quickly to these things”, and gives an example.

“I have always communicated very well with the Japanese and I have always had a very good understanding with them when it came to developing the bike,” he explained. “However, with journalists, Spanish or foreign, I have always had more difficulties, I have not had good communication,” he regrets.

No relation to its discoverer Alberto Puig

When Pedrosa speaks in the plural of what he did right or wrong, especially in the management of the media during the transition to MotoGP, he is referring to the man who was his discoverer and, for a decade, his manager: Alberto Puig. A relationship that ended in a somewhat traumatic way.

“We haven’t communicated for a long time, we just don’t talk to each other,” Dani explained about his current relationship with Puig. “I have no problems with him, absolutely. There’s not much more to add, I mean, we separated and stopped communicating, but from my side everything is fine,” he says, although he admits that, at the time, it was a tough separation. “Yes, it was a bit tough. I’m talking about me, I don’t know how he lived it, but in my case it was like that,” confesses the Catalan, who successfully overcame that chapter of his life many years ago.